Major-General Thomas Harrison: Millenarianism, Fifth Monarchism and the English Revolution 1616-1660 by David Farr Ashgate Publishing, Limited ISBN-13: 9781409465546

'Religious misery is, at the same time, the expression of real misery and the protest against that real misery." -

Cliff Slaughter

'That man of blood" Major General Thomas Harrison

"The scum and scouring of the country... Deduct the weavers, tailors, brewers, cobblers, tinkers, carmen, draymen, broom-men and mat makers and then give me a list of the gentlemen. Their names may be writ in text, within the compass of a single halfpenny.  Mercurius Elencticus (7-14 June I648), British Library, E447/ II, 226

Major General Thomas Harrison is probably best remembered for his part in the regicide of King Charles Ist. His calling the monarch "that man of blood" will also stay in the minds of people who study and read about this period for many more decades to come.

It is, therefore, a little surprising that Harrison has not had a full modern academic study given that he played such a fundamental role in the English Revolution. It is to David Farr and Ashgate publishers credit that this poor oversight has been largely rectified.

In the past, the absence of such a biography has been because of a lack of source material." Historian C H Simpkinson who in his review Thomas Harrison- Regicide and Major General in the American Historical Review Vol 11 No 1 1905 said "it would be interesting to know what induced the publishers of the Temple Biographies to include in their list Thomas Harrison. It is impossible to make out of him a popular subject. 

Moreover, the facts in his life are too little known to make it possible to write a successful popular biography. Consequently, it would be better to have attempted a life based strictly upon thorough research".[1]

Farr's biography is based on very thorough research.  It is certainly is the most subtle view of Harrison that has previously has been portrayed. As the blurb for the book points out "Unlike the only two previous full-length studies of Harrison, the present work makes use of a full range of manuscript, primary and secondary sources, including the vast range of new material that has fundamentally changed how the early modern period is now understood. Fully footnoted and referenced, this study provides the first modern academic study of Harrison".

One difficulty Farr sought to overcome was that Harrison is best known for his role in the regicide of Charles 1st. Harrison was one of the foremost republican leaders during the English revolution. He was never forgiven by later monarchists for this role, and his death was a brutal and bloody affair.

He was hanged, drawn and quartered by the Restoration government in 1660. Harrison's gruesome fate was witnessed by Samuel Pepys who wrote of him "To my Lord's in the morning, where I met with Captain Cuttance, but my Lord not being up I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart is shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy. It is said, that he said that he was sure to come shortly at the right hand of Christ to judge them that now had judged him; and that his wife do expect his coming again".[2]

Given that Harrison's later life is better documented than his earlier work it is understandable that Farr in his book employs a thematic, rather than a chronological approach, as the introduction says in order "to illustrate the role of millenarianism and providence in the English Revolution, religion within the new model army, literature, image and reputation, and Harrison's relationship with key individuals like Ireton and Cromwell as well as groups, most notably the Fifth Monarchists".

The book is subdivided into three main parts. The first part starts with an analysis of Harrison's last few years of life. Farr seeks in this section of the book to explain Harrison's problem in coming to terms with the political collapse of the Interregnum regimes. A collapse he had no social, political or military answer to. It must be said that he was not the only radical figure to fail to understand his fall from influence and power. Harrison's only answer was to put his faith in God, believing that his fall from power had been pre-ordained.

This answer may have suited people living in the 17th century, but I am afraid people residing in the 21st century need a little more. One of the few historians to examine the defeat of the radical groups was Christopher Hill. Hill controversially sought to understand how the radical groups fell from Providence so quickly. He believed that Milton's Paradise Lost was a "mediation on the reasons for the revolution's failure."His conclusions were a little pessimistic especially when he drew incorrect comparisons with 'other failed revolutions.

Part two examines "Harrison's years of 'power." Farr spends a significant amount of space in this part of the book evaluating Harrison's political activities and how they impacted on his role in the New Model Army and his major part in the trial and regicide of the king. Farr's research into regicide is a welcome change from modern revisionist historiography. Geoffrey Robertson agreed that revisionist "historians rarely have a good word to say about the trial".

Harrison was one of the first regicides to be put on trial and publicly executed. Leading monarchists and the king saw Harrison as the leading Puritan revolutionary. Important both politically and militarily enough to act out their very public revenge. Of the 59 regicides, Harrison was third only to Cromwell and Henry Ireton in the leadership of the revolution. Also, he was a key individual in the process that brought Charles to his execution. A swift show trial and implementation were meant to demonstrate to the population that revolutionary action should be discouraged.

Harrison was proceeded against because he was seen as a personification of the revolutionary republicanism that had seen the first and only Republic in English history. The show trial aimed to make the regicide illegitimate in the eyes of the population. It did not work too well. So much so that the bourgeoisie has for centuries sought to remove it from history.

According to an article in the February 2014 issue of History, Today even the new immigration test has eliminated the entire period of the civil war because "the wounds are still too fresh."[3]Conservative historians have in the last analysis sought to deny that all of modern England grew up out of the revolution in the seventeenth century.

Chapter 3 is certainly the most problematical in the sense that Farr's use of words such as "textual" is a little ambiguous. Take for instance this quote quote "in October 1660, the restoration regime staged show trials of the men it regarded as either the greatest immediate threat, the most culpable for the regicide or most responsible for the subsequent non-monarchical regimes. Harrison's execution was also reinforced in the text to disseminate the example as widely as possible.

Harrison had felt impelled to act in 1642 and, in 1660, the dynamic of religion still prompted him to make a final protest. Harrison, by the unrepentant stand he took at his trial and the courageous manner in which he met his death, and also the textual representations of his actions also provided a contrasting example of protest and continued allegiance to what he regarded as a godly cause. The contradictory messages from the same events can be seen in the differing textual responses they provoked and how they were read. Harrison's stance and the responses to it, whether textual or 'real', can also be seen as partly responsible for the limits of the overt restoration repression".[4]

I do not like Farr's use of the word "textual" it tends s to give far to much credence to the work of historians such as the late Stuart Hall who was in or around the Communist Party of Britain. Hall advocated cultural studies as a way of analyzing the past and present historical and political problems. As was pointed out in a recent obituary of Hall "Cultural Studies originated as part of an attack on revolutionary Marxism, directed above all against its contemporary expression, Trotskyism. The academic field sought to shift the focus of social criticism away from class and onto other social formations, thus promoting the development of identity politics. Its establishment, in the final analysis, was a hostile response to the gains made by the Trotskyist movement in Britain from the 1950s onwards.[5]

Farr correctly points out that the trial was considered risky and in some cases bordered on the reckless action of the ruling elite at the time. Harrison still had considerable if passive support amongst sections of the lower middle classes.

To his supporters, he was an example that despite coming from a poor and relatively obscure background, a man could rise to the highest positions in the state. While not being openly for Harrison's revolutionary politics, i.e. his republicanism Farr does an excellent job of restoring Harrison's reputation. Unlike many modern-day historians, he believes that Harrison's behaviour during and after the war was significantly influenced by his earlier life and economic position. Farr describes him as being on the "fringes of merchant and lawyer networks."

Farr suggests Harrison was "radicalized by his experience in the armies of the Eastern Association and new Model to emerge as an extreme millenarian at the centre of the army's revolution of 1647–49 and the developing Fifth Monarchist movement to late 1653". That Harrison was radicalized during the civil war is, without doubt, however, I believe that his strong republicanism and his support for the Fifth Monarchists were also a product of radical ideas that were developing before the outbreak of the Civil war. London pre-civil war was an attraction for any radical group or individual to express their beliefs and to win new supporters.

It is to Harrison's eternal credit that he very publicly denounced the king as 'that man of blood in early November 1647. A full two years before the king was due to be executed. On this particular issue, Harrison had considerable support inside the New Model Army for this action.

Harrison sought through prayer meetings to find the answer to complex political, social and even military problems through God. Harrison was not a great theoretician despite being a strong letter writer he published no significant body of work and nothing in his papers show a clear theoretical understanding of republicanism, notwithstanding this handicap it must be said he was a little more farsighted than Cromwell.  This did not stop him standing at "Cromwell's shoulder as a fellow millenarian, perhaps a reminder to Cromwell of, in his most opportune moments, his desire for a hagiocracy. The calling of the nominated assembly, more commonly known as the 'Barebones Parliament', in July 1653 was, perhaps, the closest Britain came to a theocracy and, on the surface, at its heart appeared to be Harrison and the millenarian Fifth Monarchists".[6]

As was said earlier, the previous historiography regarding Harrison leaves a lot to be desired. The last book-length study of Thomas Harrison came out in 1939. Varley's account of Harrison appeared in the 'highgate worthies' series. C H Simpkinson's did a series of lectures that were made into a biography.

Harrison is given a brief comment in Maurice Ashley's 1954 Cromwell's Generals. Harrison's New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was by Ian Gentles in 2004.

One way around this problem is to examine as Farr has done and that is to place Harrison in the context of his membership of the Fifth Monarchist movement. 

The Marxist Cliff Slaughter once said 'Religious misery is at the same time the expression of real misery and the protest against that real misery." [7]The Fifth Monarchists did express  the "sigh of the oppressed." Given that the Fifth Monarchist was not only a sizable group but wielded considerable influence, it is baffling that Left historians like  Christopher Hill's wrote so little about them.

Hill's The World Turned Upside Down contains next to nothing on the Fifth Monarchy group. The Pseudo Left David Renton believes the Leveller's, diggers were of more importance.[8]A cursory look at previous historiography on the movement would uncover a degree of confusion as to exactly the origins of the group. A study undertaken in 1912 has the Fifth Monarchists alongside the Baptists.

As C. Eden Quainton said" he Quakers and Fifth Monarchy men, for example, were certainly entitled to be called Anabaptists, but the label meant nothing except dislike when applied to the Presbyterians.  Anything, however, in the nature of millennial belief or hope was certain to be called Anabaptist, as was the case with Fifth Monarchy opinions, which were adopted by many Anabaptists, especially in the army".[9]

Any study of the group would have to take into consideration Bernard Capp's 1972 study.  Capp placed the Fifth Monarchists in their broadest possible context being principally an urban movement and appealing to people below the gentry. In modern terms, this was a movement of the minor petty bourgeoisie. Many of the members of the Fifth Monarchists had a real fear that the civil war would reduce them to penury.

One right-wing pamphlet at the time wrote of the Fifth Monarchy men "The scum and scouring of the country.... Deduct the weavers, tailors, brewers, cobblers, tinkers, carmen, draymen, broom-men and mat makers and then give me a list of the gentlemen. Their names may be writ in the text, within the compass of a single halfpenny.  Mercurius Elencticus (7-14 June I648), British Library, E447/ II, 226.

It is hard not to agree with Capp's assertion that Harrison and his Fifth Monarchy friends did not have a coherent set of beliefs and should not be seen as a political party. While this is true if you examine them from the standpoint of the 21st century, but if you consider them in the sense of the 17th century the fact that 40,000 people had similar beliefs and were prepared to fight and die for their beliefs this was a politically significant body of people.

They faced the same problem as other radical groups such and the Levelers and Diggers in that they came from a relatively similar class background as the leaders of the revolution, Ireton, and Cromwell. While political differences were apparent, especially regard equality and the franchise.

The fifth monarchists were part of a group of men that sought to understand the profound political and social changes that were taking place at the beginning of the 17th century. They were the true 'Ideologues of the revolution' and had a limited capacity for abstract thought. To some degree, I agree with Perez Zagorin that there were similarities with other radical groups such as the Levellers, and Diggers.

In other areas they were radically different, sections did advocate a violent overthrow of society so much so that they were persecuted and were spied upon by Cromwell's spymaster general John Thurloe. In the end, they had no program to bring about social change. Sections of the group were in favour of bringing in a Mosaic code. This collection of religious edicts were extremely authoritarian and bordered on a form of clerical fascism.

Their class outlook, that being of small producers, conditioned their ideology. The contradiction between their concern for the poor and their position of representatives of the small property owners caused some tension. They had no opposition to private property, and therefore they accepted that inequalities would always exist, they merely argued for a lot of the poor to be made more equitable.

Christopher Hill's review of Capp's book praises him for his research that opposes the general view from conservative historians that they and other radicals were a "lunatic fringe." While having similarities with the Leveller's a significant difference was their opposition to the extension of the franchise. Also, unlike the Levelers, the Fifth Monarchists were far more interested in extending the revolution abroad. John Roger's argued, "how dust our Army to be still, now the work is to do abroad."

Farr's book pays considerable attention despite a paucity of information to the pre-1642 Harrison. Farr correctly states that Harrison's "millenarian outlook" was shaped by a developing religious ferment, his meeting of like-minded military people in the Eastern Association and his economic position in society. "Farr provides considerable evidence that Harrison was no great shakes as a politician it is common knowledge that he "was a failure as a political leader, primarily due to his being 'sadly wanting in the arts of political strategy' or because of his 'lack of patience for administrative routine' by considering in detail Harrison's engagement with the daily parliamentary routine in his time as an MP".

Part 3 examines Harrison's time in the New Model Army and the link between his socioeconomic status and his political and military actions. He was a loyal and valuable member of the army.  Farr attempts in his book to examine to what extent Harrison's political and military activities were influenced by socioeconomic factors. Farr draws upon the work of Ian Gentles, who has written extensively on the political, social and economic makeup of the New Model Army participants. In an essay called The New Model Officer Corps in 1647- Gentles is one of the few historians who has bothered to analyze who did the fighting in the civil war.

Gentles writes "As absorbing as this debate continues to be, it is noteworthy that few historians in the twentieth century have had anything to say about those who did the actual fighting. Over 100,000 men put their lives at risk on behalf of the king or parliament. While many of them had been pressed into service, thousands of others, mostly cavalry, took up arms voluntarily. Why were so many ready to kill and to risk being killed? Is there any correlation between their social origins or their economic interests, and their allegiance in the civil war? This study attempts to answer this question about the revolutionary army. It was the New Model more than any other body of men that forced the pace of cataclysmic events between I645, the year of its founding, and i653 when its leader Oliver Cromwell expelled the remnant of the Long Parliament. Can anything be discovered about their socioeconomic profile? Is there any link between the sociology of the army and its political radicalism"?.

It is with this spirit of inquiry that Farr examines the link between Harrison's socioeconomic background and his military and political actions. As is stated in the introduction "Harrison's history in his native Staffordshire, particularly the economic, political and religious circumstances of the Harrison family in Newcastle-under-Lyme. Harrison's roots are then further developed by illustrating how important his move to London was in shaping why he became a parliamentary activist at such an early stage, as well as laying the foundations for some of the key political, economic and religious connections of his later life. It enables the text to finish on a rounded picture of the trajectory of his life from 1616 to his execution in 1660, rooted in the personal and economic factors that have been overlooked in light of his high-profile religious and political radicalism but were very much part of who he was".

Some objective problems do come up when examining a soldier's beliefs in the New Model Army. The main one being a lack of historical data, especially for rank and file soldiers. Gentles, therefore, concentrates his research on the upper sections of the army's hierarchy.

Social mobility in the military was very fluid according to Gentles "we would expect men who did not enter the army as commissioned officers to come from humbler backgrounds than those who did. At least thirty-seven, or nearly a sixth of the 238 officers, are known to have arisen from the rank of private, corporal, sergeant or quartermaster. This is in striking contrast to the royalist armies, where the policy was never to promote non-commissioned officers to commissioned rank. Data about social status are available for only fifteen of the thirty-seven, and not surprisingly, they were mostly merchants, tradesmen, and small yeomen. The other twenty-two, about whom nothing has been uncovered, are unlikely to have been more exalted in their status".

Gentles concludes with a point "The radical dynamic which was unleashed by the potent brew of anti-popery, antinomianism, and Puritan egalitarianism was accentuated by the youthfulness and the low social status of the New Model officers who articulated it." It is a shame that there is little of this kind of research into socioeconomic influences on political or military decisions. After all, it was Cromwell who knew the importance of socioeconomic status, the man about whom Cromwell said he would 'rather have a plain, russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else.'

To conclude, Farr's book is a highly enjoyable read. More importantly, it has shone a bright light on a person that deserves far more research. Also, he has shown the Fifth Monarchists to be an important part of the English Revolution. While far more needs to be studied on the republicanism expressed by the group. Farr's book should be read straight after Capp's work. The book deserves a broad audience and would be a comfortable read for a general reader as well as the more academic one. Hopefully, it will be placed on university reading lists in the future. I am hopeful the paperback version will be a little cheaper.

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[1] Thomas Harrison- Regicide and Major General by C H Simpkinson-American Historical Review Vol 11 No 1 1905

[2] The Diary of Samuel Pepys-13th October 1660.

[3] Reluctant Regicides, Toby Haggith and Richard Weight, History Today February 2014

[4] Major-General Thomas Harrison: Millenarianism, Fifth Monarchism and the English Revolution 1616-1660 by David Farr Ashgate Publishing, Limited ISBN-13: 9781409465546

[5] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism

[6] Introduction Major General Thomas Harrison David Farr- Ashgate 2014

[7] Religion, and Social Revolt Cliff Slaughter Labor Review Vol 3 No 3 June 1958

[8] www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/marxist_history.html 

[9] Cromwell and the Anabaptists during 1653 Author(s): C. Eden Quainton Source: Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Jun., 1932), pp. 164-178

To Have no Newes is good Newes

1 E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism- edited by Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor. As part of the anniversary of Thompson’s ground breaking work The making of the English Working Class Manchester University Press have released this collection of essays. They have kindly given me a review copy and this book will be reviewed on this blog in the not too distant future.

2 Warwick University Ltd- a book written by E P Thompson in 1970 written in a week Thompson sought to expose the fact that universities like Warwick had not only been spying on its students but had developed increasingly incestuous relations with big business. As Thompson said the “Is it inevitable that the university will be reduced to the function of providing, with increasingly authoritarian efficiency, pre-packed intellectual commodities which meet the requirements of management? Or can we by our efforts transform it into a center of free discussion and action, tolerating and even encouraging “subversive” thought and activity, for a dynamic renewal of the whole society in which it operates? “Page (166) Spokesman books have sent me a review copy. A critical review will be posted on this blog.

3.The Levellers- Radical political thought in the English Revolution. By Rachel Foxley.  Manchester University again have been kind enough to send me review copy .I have begun research for a review of this major book.. John Rees’s review can be found @ http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1519

4. John Adamson’s review of Rebellion: Britain’s First Stuart Kings 1567-1642. By Tim Harris Oxford University Press. Published in Literary Review Febuary 2014

5. Lesley Mitchell’s review of One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor Roper edited by Richard Davenport –Hines and Adam Sisman. Published by Oxford University Press. Can be found at Literary Review Feb 2014.

6. The Online Library Of Liberty plan to put online a seven volume collection of Leveller tracts from the English Revolution. 1638-1659 There website can be found at http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=149

The English Revolution c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities, ed. Nicholas Tyacke. ( Manchester U.P., 2007; pp. 212. £55).

This collection of essays edited by Nicholas Tyacke are a bold attempt at placing the English revolution in the context of long term political and social changes in England that started in the late 1590s and went on well into the 1720s.

Most of the essays are concentrated on the crisis of transition by the English Revolution (1640–60).

It is a big ask to cover 120 years of very complex changes in England which saw the country transform from a relatively back wood feudal economy into the early beginnings of a capitalist country saw the execution of a king and the establishment of a republic.

The date span c.1590–1720 places the book in the context of a long seventeenth century. From a historiographical standpoint this theoretically at least places this collection of essays firmly in the school of thought belonging to several left-wing historians most famously Eric Hobsbawm. His seminal essay was the  Crisis of the Seventeenth Century published in Past and Present.

The term was coined by English Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm in his pair of 1954 articles and complimented by his contemporary, Hugh Trevor-Roper, in a 1959 article entitled "The General Crisis of the Seventeenth-Century" published in the same journal. According to Wikipedia "Hobsbawm discussed an economic crisis in Europe; Trevor-Roper saw a wider crisis, a crisis in the relations between society and the State".

It would be wrong to think that this collection of present-day historians would like to return to more left-wing historiography. The book only pays lip service to some conceptions normally associated with the left historians, for example, the continued use of the phrase "English revolution". The book contains ten essays from a mostly post revisionist historiography. Some of these essays came from a 2004 colloquium on 'The English Revolution and its legacies.

One aspect of this lip service to left-wing historiography is the adoption of the book of a premise that the origins of and to some extent the causes of the English revolution can be found in a long-term viewpoint.

In his introduction, Tyacke tries to reevaluate the revolutionary nature of the revolutionary events of 1640 to 1660. In doing so, he seeks to place this collection firmly in the camp of what has been labelled the 'post revisionist school of historiography.

It is hard to understand what audience this collection of historians is appealing to. Having said that Tyacke does provide a very good introduction to the subject. In his 'locating the 'English Revolution' his analysis of Whig and Marxist historiography does give the reader a good insight into two major interpretations of the English revolution. His analysis of the revisionist interpretation of this period is a little weak. Perhaps the reason being that Tyacke and most of the other historians in this collection are too close to revisionist positions.

As one reviewer put it "Few revisionists will be won over at this stage, but some may find themselves mobilizing in anticipation of a wider onslaught".[1]The book is not a point-scoring exercise against previous revisionist positions. There is a limited attempt to provide an alternative viewpoint of a very complex subject.

The book is broad in its scope. Some of the strongest chapters are ones that deal with the period 1640 to 1660. While purporting to be about moving on from revisionist historiography, the subjects chosen in this collection are all ones that most revisionist historians are comfortable with the exception being John Walters's essay.

Sean Kelsey's chapter is well-argued and well-researched on the King's Book. Eikon Basilike and the English Revolution of 1649 covers some ground that John Adamson has tread and will tread in his forthcoming book. Kelsey, without intention, highlights that despite what revisionists say there were class differences amongst even the Royalists. I hope Kelsey continues this work because a lot of this kind of research has been abandoned by revisionist historians.

This collection of essays sits very easily with the reader, and they do provide a wide-ranging analysis but whether they form a groundbreaking development of a post-revisionist agenda, I am not entirely sure.

Perhaps the two historians that are readily identifiable as 'post revisionist are Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, their previous work[2] has built up a body of historiography that has emphasized the ideological struggle that went on before, during and after the revolution.

Michael Braddick's essay, The English Revolution and its legacies are in keeping with Hughes and Cust in that they all use the term The English Revolution. Braddick believes that 'the energies unleashed in the 1640s provided the dynamic for a long revolution, encompassing the exclusion crisis and the "Glorious Revolution". Braddick coupled the English Revolution with the 1688 revolution.

The stand out essay is John Walter's Politicizing the popular? The 'tradition of riot' and popular political culture in the English Revolution. While holding some similar positions to several Marxist historians, his research into popular riots and disturbances upholds a tradition of "history from below" school of historiography. Walter does subscribe to the revolutionary nature of the period, and that that there was a clash of ideologies he does not subscribe to the belief that the lower sections of society were major players in the drama.

To conclude, this collection of essays sets itself very difficult tasks. I am not sure it completes those tasks. To be in favour of the conception of a long 17th century is difficult enough, it is nearly impossible when most of the essay writers reject any Marxist conceptions that would have given the book a much better analysis. The fact that none of the essays tackles deep-seated changes in the English economy is a glaring absence. The growing distaste amongst revisionist and post revisionist historians for economic historiography is damaging and short-sighted. All in all, I would recommend the book for students of the subject and the general public. The book is well written and researched. Although a read around the subject is a must

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[1] English Historical Review (2010) Ian Warren  doi: 10.1093/ehr/ceq085 First published online: April 19, 2010

[2] Conflict in Early Stuart England (1989; rev. ante, cv [1990], 966–8)

Film Review: A Field in England - Ben Wheatley's Civil War drama , 90mins. Starring: Reece Shearsmith, Richard Glover, Michael Smiley (15) Geoffrey Macnab

"The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone…Life is nasty, brutish, and short."

― Thomas Hobbes.

Given that there is a paucity of worthwhile films on the English Civil War, it is perhaps understandable that Ben Wheatley's new film has received significant interest from historians and mainstream newspapers.

The period covered by the film is known to be in the words of one reviewer "one of the most exciting and tumultuous periods in English and British history".

Quite why Wheatley chose the setting of the Civil War is a bit of a mystery. Anyone looking for a history lesson will be bitterly disappointed.

The film pays homage to so many different film genres; it is sometimes a little hard to keep up. The film is beautifully shot in black and white and is heavily influenced by the 1975 film Winstanley.

Wheatley's film, like Winstanley, has a "stark monochrome beauty" to it. The film style pays homage to the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. Like Winstanley A Field in England has a resonance with the German expressionist films of the 1920s and 1930s,

While the style of the two films is similar, the substance is entirely different. A Field in Britain offers no real insight into the ideological differences that arose during the Civil war. However, if you would like to see a film that is beautifully photographed, funny in parts, disturbingly violent and crude, then this is your film.

It would be mistaken to believe that the film has no philosophy. Wheatley's apparent limited understanding of the Civil war does not stop him from portraying his characters coming straight out of Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan. In other words, they were 'nasty, poor, brutish, and short'.

The film has a very basic plotline. Shot on a very small budget and is only 90 minutes long. Following the life of four deserters. While it is unclear which side the deserters came from I would hazard a guess that three came from Parliament's side and one Whitehead was a Royalist sympathiser. Little is seen of the battle that our 'heroes' flee from they stumble into a field which is entirely where the film is set.

After eating some magic mushrooms, the group comes under the control of what seems a devil-like figure O'Neil played very well by Michael Smiley. O' Neil has been having been pursued by our anti-hero, Whitehead. What plays out is largely a battle between good and evil.

Is A Field in England a fair reflection of the times we live in?  Annette Bullen had this to say:  "In fact, I think that both these films reflect their times and the concerns of the day. Winstanley began shooting in the late 1960s at the end of the period where Marxist historians' interpreted the English Civil War as a revolution. It was released in 1975 and this, rather neatly, coincided with a shift in the interpretation of these events in favour of new revisionist interpretations. So the earnest and urgent call for the revolution which began in the 1960s had, by the time of the film's release, been taken over by a reinterpretation of the Civil War as being more evolutionary, stressing the importance of attempting to understand events and evidence in context rather than as a stage in a Marxist interpretation of history.

A Field in England, too, reflects our current times. Religion, a fundamental part of society during the 17th century, hardly features, with only one of the five characters being in any way religious and the others sneering or indifferent to his prayers and his god. They would rather go to the pub to have a beer and a good stew than go to church. Nor are any of the characters interested in politics or the huge events taking place around them. Cromwell and the King are mentioned but these soldiers are self-interested and self-absorbed, fighting for an unknown cause with little conviction. They make a total contrast to Winstanley's New Model Army, who carry copies of 'The Case of the Armie' in their hats and debate at Putney their rights within the society for which they have fought". [1]

The fact that A Field in England has no Marxist revolutionary ideology or any recognisable ideology sad reflection on not only the filmmakers but on current historiography.  The film is a wasted opportunity.

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[1] http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1446)

The Crisis of Theory: E. P. Thompson, the New Left, and Postwar British Politics- Scott Hamilton ISBN: 9780719084355 Pages: 288pp.Publisher: Manchester University Press

"I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backwards-looking".

The Making of the English Working Class

Even a basic internet search for the name E. P. Thompson brings forth a wealth of material by and about the historian. It is without a doubt that he played an extremely important part in the intellectual, social and political life of hundreds of thousands of people over the last half-century. He was an extremely capable historian, and his work has provided us with valuable insight into the problems of mankind's historical development.

A cursory read of Hamilton's book reveals that Thompson was not only a historian of note but was a political animal. Unlike many of his co-thinkers in the Communist Party Historians Group Thompson wrote major polemical essays concerning political events during the 20th century.

Hamilton's book is not an orthodox biography. It concentrates heavily on Thompson's political career to the detriment of his historical writings. The book's title The Crisis of Theory stems from Hamilton's belief that Thompson's break with Stalinism in 1956 was a 'crisis of theory' Whether it led Thompson away from the working class and Marxism is a moot point as he was never an orthodox Marxist in the first place. The fact of the matter is that he was never close politically to the working class and was never close to an orthodox Marxist position or group. We shall see later in the review that he was opposed virulently to orthodox Marxism.

Scott Hamilton's book is largely an extension of his PhD dissertation covering Thompson's The Poverty of Theory. Hamilton spent a significant amount of time studying the writings and letters from the archive of Hull University. He offers an extremely friendly account of Thompson's polemical battles.

The book has appeared at the same time as a veritable cottage industry of material relating to the life and work of E P Thompson. It is after all fifty years since Thompson published his seminal work The Making of the English Working Class.  Harvard University will be holding a conference on the book.  Birkbeck University held a conference entitled The future of 'history from below: an online symposium, papers from the conference can be found at the many-headed monster blog.  A new collection of essays called E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism by Roger Fieldhouse (Editor), Richard Taylor (Editor) will be published by Manchester University Press (1 December 2013) in celebration of the anniversary of Thompson's book The Making of the English Working Class.

Hamilton's book The Crisis of Theory is an interesting addition to our attempt to understand Thompson's place in history. Hamilton has taken great care to try and locate Thompson's life and work in the context of broader political, social and events.

Even though this is not an orthodox biography, he still had the foresight to do this. Also, to his credit, he has not created a hagiography. However, this is not to say that the book does not have several political shortcomings and not a few mistakes, for instance, Thompson went to Cambridge, not Oxford as Hamilton said and perhaps worse several historians are misnamed and their books assigned to the wrong authors. Like all good semi-biographical books, Hamilton's takes us through Thompson's life chronologically. He and his brother Frank were drawn at an early age to the British Communist Party. Hamilton's evaluation of this period is very useful.

He makes clear that the two brothers joined an extremely nationalistic party. Thompson joined at a time when the British Communist Party had broken from orthodox Marxism and had adopted Stalinism as its political orientation. One thing that perturbs me about Hamilton's evaluation of Thompson's early politics is his tendency to romanticize the Thompson brothers national outlook and in the case of Frank, a case of outright racism. During the Second World War Frank Thompson lamented that "it is humiliating, just sitting around while Yanks, the Chinks and the Russkies teach us how to fight".

E P Thompson did not join a Marxist party. It was clear that Thompson came back from the war a convinced Stalinist. He made no statement condemning the Moscow Trials and subsequent executions of leading Bolsheviks at the hands of Stalin and his supports in the Soviet Union. No statement was made in defence of the Russian working class which had its entire revolutionary leadership destroyed by Stalin. At his time of joining the British CP, he had broken from any traces of Marxism. It is perhaps a major weakness of the book that it does not discuss this period. Especially the conflict In the Soviet Party between Stalin and Trotsky.

Thompson at an early age rejected the orthodox Marxism represented by Leon Trotsky despite later breaking with Stalinism it is clear that Thompsons' subsequent historical and political writings to a lesser extent were still imbued with Stalinist influences. It was a very bad training school and Thompson never entirely abandoned all that he learnt there.

Thompson's adoption of the theory of the Popular front would mould his thinking up until he died. The most finished example of this was his making of the English Working Class. As he said the Making "I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backwards-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties".The same could be said about Thompson.

The book is a significant piece of history and deserves its high place in the historiography of English history. However, the book has a too heavy emphasis on the subjective nature of class consciousness and not enough of the objective. Furthermore, Thompson in one preface to his book tends to right off completely the revolutionary capacity of the English working class when he says "Causes which were lost in England might occur in Asia or Africa, yet might be won." 

It may be true that Thompson sought in his political writings to distance himself from his Stalinist past but in his historical writings, this is not the case. This separation was almost Jesuit, like. Thompson's use of the concept of "history from below" owes a lot to the Popular Front policy used by the Stalinists in the 1930s. He was not alone in using the concept nearly all the Communist Party historians including Hill, Rude and Morton were influenced by it.

For Ann Talbot "the Communist Party sponsored a form of "People's History, which is typified by A.L. Morton's People's History of England in which the class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People's history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which provided a democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torre".[1]

For Thompson and others, there was never a contradiction between the avocation of Popular Front politics and the historian's group writing about democratic groups such as the Levellers in the vein of history from below. As Talbot says above the CPHG group tended to glorify an unbroken historical line of English radicalism. This outlook permeated E P Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, which portrays the English working class as inherently radical and therefore not needing a Marxist scientific perspective. A leading member of the Group, Dona Torr, decided to position Tom Mann in her study Tom Mann and his Times, as a figure that "was a late representative in a story of England's long-running struggle".

This downplaying and in some cases the outright hostility to a scientific Marxist study of these radical groups is expressed in several pseudo-left groups today. The largest group being the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). When the SWP review any book by the members of the CPHG, there is a tendency to glorify the attachment these historians had to 'Marxism'.

As Paul Blackledge writes "Edward Thompson's masterful The Making of the English Working Class (1963), has had an undoubtedly positive effect on historiography, the pressures of academic specialization have also led to the production of an awful lot of dross. Saville has stood out against this tendency, and for that, he is to be congratulated. Indeed, his background in both Historians? Group and the New Left seems to have left him incapable of following the traditional historians? Path of finding an archive and mining it for information irrespective of any meaning that might be attached to the published results. So, where contemporary historiography is torn by a debate between postmodernists and empiricists, Saville practices the kind of Marxist historiography that overcomes the opposition between theory and facts. Against the postmodernists, his work is steeped in a serious examination of primary evidence; against traditional empiricist history, his Marxism provides him with a vantage point from which he can justify his research method".[2]

E P Thompson described the CPHG approach as "quaintly empirical". I am not condemning all the work of the historians by raising this point that would be facile as they produced some of the most outstanding historiographies of any generation, but it does show the handicap they were working under.

Thompson's methodology would lead him to periods of great elation and periods of abject pessimism. Hamilton, to his credit, gives numerous examples of this. He believed that Thompson had 'an uneasy mixture of catastrophism and hyper-optimism' (p. 159).

Hamilton does not go into detail regarding Thompson's role inside the CPHG. Despite having a close working relationship with Christopher Hill. Hamilton seems to believe that Thompson was not close to the group. It is strange that Hamilton makes little of this relationship. Hill appears only once in Hamilton's index.

One reviewer queries this "there are certain problems with Hamilton's analytical scheme. One may ask, for instance, why the definitive moment of Thompson's life (1936–46) is not extended to 1956. His relationship with Communist writers and historians of the period from 1946 to 1956 played a crucial role in Thompson's Popular Frontism. Hamilton omits from his account the most influential group in Thompson's life, the Historians' Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Dona Torr, the guru of the Historian's Group and Thompson's mentor, is never mentioned. Yet, it is highly unlikely that Thompson's William Morris and The Making of the English Working Class would have been written without her influence". He and Hill quit the Communist Party in 1956, and Thompson's view of the 17th Century revolution shares some similarities with Hill's, however, Thompson's view diverged from Hill's over the timing of the transition from feudalism to capitalism".

Thompson's view that there was an "epochal" bourgeois revolution in England in the 17th century came under heavy criticism from his onetime colleague Perry Anderson. The reply to Anderson's criticism of Thompson evaluation of English history took the form of a book-length polemic called The Peculiarities of the English.

Anderson wrote "The notion of an 'epochal' bourgeois revolution in Britain, stretching from the 12th to the 19th century, is a Ptolemaic hypothesis. It implies that capitalism can only be introduced by a classical bourgeoisie—a view parallel to the belief that socialism can only be introduced by an industrial proletariat. Both are incorrect. History has what Ernst Bloch calls a certain 'aperity', which allows several possible agents for a single process. [128] This interpretation restores the civil war to its pivotal role in modern history, without characterizing it crudely as a 'bourgeois revolution'.[3]

It is not possible in the space of this review to go into great of this debate, but some points can be made. It must be said that Anderson's position is remarkably close to a large number of revisionist historians in the field of early modern English history who in one way or another downplayed the significance of the English revolution.

Another thing is Anderson's use of the work of J H Hexter against Thompson. Hexter was a very right-wing historian who attacked Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill with a ferocity that would not have looked out of place in a boxing match.  Anderson says "One cannot help wondering if Thompson has kept up with the literature on the subject since that date. Has he, for instance, ever looked at Hexter's devastating essay The Myth of the Middle Class in Elizabethan England? Is he even aware of Hexter's famous critique of precisely the notion of an 'epochal' bourgeois revolution? His text is innocent of the smallest echo of all this. He would surely have shown more misgivings in pronouncing the English landowners of the era of Lord North a 'true bourgeoisie' if he had assimilated the lessons of this body of work. He would also have been less surprised at the stress laid in our essays on the pre-eminence and perdurance of the English aristocracy (in the sociological, not the titular sense) well into the 19th and 20th centuries".

Having read Hexter's essay, I am not sure it is all that devastating. And to use it against Thompson is Anderson's right but he should have chosen his friends in this argument with a little more care.  To give Thompson his due, he knew a little more about the English revolution than Anderson. Having said this, I do not give him a blank cheque. More work needs to be done on his differences with Christopher Hill.

If the time spent in and around the Communist Party was Thompson's first critical period of influence. His involvement with the New Reasoner/New Left projects was undoubtedly his second most critical time. After his resignation from the CP Thompson was one of several left-wing intellectuals who founded the New Reasoner which was the forerunner of the New Left Review. The latter journal is still published today. In reality, the New Reasoner was a home to anybody who was opposed to orthodox Marxism.

While Hamilton's book concentrates on Thompson's polemic against other political rivals such as Louis Althusser, Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson to name a few, it says nothing on Thompson's attitude to the orthodox Marxist groups at the time such as G Healy's  Socialist Labour League. Maybe this is an error that will be corrected by Hamilton in future projects.

If Hamilton had spent a little time at the British Library which contains a number of the Socialist Labour League theoretical journal Labour Review it would have given him a much closer approximation of Thompson' political and for that matter historical proclivities. Marxists inside the SLL were hostile to the New Reasoner's politics (Thompson's earlier magazine), but the SLL was open to debate. In an article from Labour Review October –November 1959 Healy was mindful of the sharp polemics that Thompson had been involved in and sought in his article called – "The New left Must Look to the Working Class" to open a debate with Thompson and his supporters.

Having said that Healy did not mince his words when he says "What strikes one immediately on reading E P Thompson's article is that he entirely omits the working class; consequently there is no attempt to analyze the relationship between the left of today and the working class. One would imagine that the New Left had just arrived and existed in a world of its own. The opposite, of course, is the case. The New Left is not just a grouping of people around several new ideas that they have developed independently. This new development on the left reflects a particular phase in the development of the crisis of capitalism, which for socialists is the crisis of the working-class movement. Like movements among intellectuals and students in the past, the recent emergence of the new left is the warning of a resurgence of the working class as an active political force in Britain. The crisis, which is the basis of such action finds its first reflection in the battle of ideas."[4]

From the early origins of Thompson's magazine New Reasoner, it was clear that he did not intend to have a debate with the Orthodox Trotskyists. Despite trying to have cordial relations with Thompson and his supporters, it became increasingly clear that Thompson did not see the Trotskyist's around Healy as being a part of the working class. Healy's response was to say that "Comrade Thompson seems to have cast away all the luggage, he was equipped within the Communist Party except-one soiled old suitcase labelled anti-Trotskyism".[5]

That analysis of Healy despite his subsequent political degeneration is as true now as it was then. Thompson's response to the SLL was to accuse it of factionalism. An epithet I might add that has been levelled at the Trotskyist movement since time immemorial.

We live as then in stormy political times, an examination of the differences between Healy and Thompson would greatly strengthen the book.  To conclude this review, it was never my intention at this moment to go into fuller detail of the disputes which occurred in the left during Thompson' lifetime. That will be done in much greater detail when I write further on E P Thomson. My main criticism of Hamilton is that he omits whether deliberately of by accident this history which does a disservice to an otherwise competent book.

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

[2] https://isj.org.uk/a-life-on-the-left/

[3] https://newleftreview.org/issues/I35/articles/perry-anderson-socialism-and-pseudo-empiricism

[4] The New Left Must Look to the Working Class Gerry Healy Labour Review Oct- Nov 1959

[5] An Unreasonable Reasoner Editorial Labour Review Vol 3 No 2 March April 1958

A short Interview With Historian John Morrill

This a Q&A with John Morrill and his team of researchers. John and his team have been working on A New Critical Edition of all the Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell.  My article on this work can be found with this link http://keith-perspective.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/why-we-need-new-critical-edition-of-all.html.

Is this a definitive version of Cromwell’s writings or is there more to be done

Nine of us have spent two years tracking down Cromwell material. We have found little significant new material (although we do have new versions of some of the speeches) but we have tracked down a lot of items not seen since they were poorly transcribed in the 18th and 19th centuries. We think it very unlikely, but not impossible, that there is unknown material ‘out there’

How different an Oliver Cromwell do we get from your research?

There is nothing transformative. But by excluding a few items that we think are apocryphal and improving the texts for some important letters and understanding the context better, we think there will be a lot of small things that cumulatively will make quite a difference – how much will only be realised when I complete my new biography based on the new edition in 2015 or 2016.

What was the most difficult problem encountered by your researchers?

A high proportion of Cromwell’s letters and speeches exist not in autographs but in multiple early copies – especially for the late 1640s and early 1650s when we have multiple print versions of each letter but no manuscript. And most of the speeches he made to his Parliaments are in multiple copies from different scribes. Stabilising those texts has been rewarding but difficult.

Are the comment sections of the writings a move away from the previous historiography on Cromwell?

We will publish three volumes of ‘texts’, each writing or speech with a contextual headnote and normal footnotes saying who people are, noting major differences between the various versions etc. And there will be two companion volumes – one a set of essays on the edition (Cromwell’s handwriting, why some things survive and others don’t and exploring the reliability of texts which are not autographs etc.) and one a set of interpretative essays by a range of scholars as they work with the new edition – Cromwell’s faith, his politics, his relations with his family, with the Army, with Parliament etc.). We think this will make the edition much more reliable than earlier ones, much more usable and much more useful

5. Are the volumes aimed primarily at an academic audience or do you plan to make them accessible to a wider audience?

The texts are presented in their original spelling and punctuation and so a bit harder to follow than modernised ones would have been, but the contextual headnotes and footnotes should allow anyone with an interest in the period to use the volumes. It will be available online with Oxford Scholarly Editions online which will be the first port of call for scholars; but it will also be in handsome volumes of 800, 800, 800, 400 and 400 pages

What is the launch date for publication?

We have completed the searches, completed the transcriptions and decided in almost every case which version to use as our ‘proof text’. Nine of us will now write the headnotes and footnotes and hope to complete that by September 2014, with a publication by the end of 2015.

No Newes is Good Newes

Books

The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy: The Revolutions of 1688-91 in their British, Atlantic and European Contexts (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History) Tim Harris, Stephen Taylor. Boydell Press have kindly given me a review copy.  The book is beautifully presented.  From Amazon “This collection sheds new light on the final crisis of the Stuart monarchy by re-examining the causes and implications of the dynastic shift of 1688-9 from a broad chronological, intellectual and geographical perspective. Comprising eleven essays by specialists in the field, it ranges from the 1660s to the mid-eighteenth century, deals with the history of ideas as well as political and religious history, and covers not just England, Scotland and Ireland but also explores the Atlantic and European contexts.

The Road Not Taken: How Britain Narrowly Missed a Revolution, 1381-1926 Paperback Frank McLynn. Having not read the book I cannot comment too much but it seems Mclynn appears to follow in the footsteps of recent revisionist historians that do not classify the English revolution as a revolution.

Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England (Haney Foundation Series) Wolfram Schmidgen. Pat Rogers reviews this book in the TLS http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1285590.ece

Books recently purchased

The crisis of Theory- Scott Hamilton- EP Thompson, the new left and post war politics. I am working on a review of this in light of the anniversary of Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class.

In contempt of all authority- B Sharp. Breviarry Stuff Publication have sent me a review copy which will be reviewed on my blog soonish.

Hobsbawm on History- Eric Hobsbawm.

Internet Newes

Daniel Reed has published his Dissertation submitted for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts 2007-2008 on http://www.academia.edu/ it charts the life of Sir John Hotham during the English revolution

Marriage in the English Revolution- The History of Parliament-http://thehistoryofparliament.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/marriage-in-the-english-revolution/

A Field In England [DVD] “A Field In England is set in the midst of the English Civil War, following a quartet of deserters. Said group soon fall under the influence of a thief, played by Michael Smiley, and the search begins for buried treasure. Wheatley, however, has more ingredients here, not least the introduction of some particularly potent mushrooms, that soon begin to affect the adventures of his characters, and the direction of the film. It ends up an utterly unpredictable, bold piece of cinema, that's frequently funny, very British and, at its best, downright brilliant. And, as always, Wheatley makes sure that the DVD doesn't skimp on interesting extra features too”. Amazon

British Library hush is broken by a row over reading room rules-http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jul/19/british-library-hush-row-reading-room

Professor Robert Ashton: Historian of early modern England- This obituary appeared in the Independent. Although the historian died earlier this year very little in the way of obituaries were written. Hopefully in the near future I would like to do one. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-robert-ashton-historian-of-early-modern-england-8533191.html