The Hunting Down of the Regicides: Counter Revolution and Historical Memory in The King’s Revenge

The execution of Charles I in January 1649 remains one of the most debated and ideologically significant incidents in English history. For many years, the establishment and historians viewed the king’s death as a shameful mistake: a tragic deviation, an act of madness, and a constitutional failure that was best quickly forgotten. However, the execution was not accidental or the result of a few extremists. It was the judicial outcome of a revolution that, for a short time, challenged the idea of sovereignty by transferring it from the monarchy to Parliament and the New Model Army. This event marked the most radical assertion of popular political power in England before the 19th century.

Michael Walsh and Don Jordan’s The King’s Revenge: Charles II and the Greatest Manhunt in British History (2012) explores the aftermath of the revolution, focusing on the counter-revolutionary search. This extensive pursuit, spanning Europe and the American colonies, targeted those who signed Charles I’s death warrant or participated in his trial. It lasted over a decade and involved assassins, spies, informers, and the full force of the restored monarchy’s coercive power. The book excels as a vivid narrative of this search, emphasising that the Restoration was not merely a political correction but also a violent reckoning with a revolutionary era.

Narrative Strengths and Historical Recovery

Although Walsh and Jordan are not professional historians, The King’s Revenge is a thorough and well-researched work of popular history. It sometimes reads like a spy thriller, with scenes of men shot outside churches, others taken back to England to be hanged, drawn, and quartered; agents operating across Europe; coded messages and secret networks. This vivid detail is purposeful. The intensity of the Restoration’s revenge underscores how deeply the old regime feared revolution and how willing it was to go to great lengths to erase any memory of alternatives to monarchy.

The book’s notable achievement is bringing back figures long pushed to the edge of historical memory, especially John Cooke, the republican lawyer who prosecuted Charles I. Often seen as merely a footnote, a legal technician in a story dominated by Cromwell and the aristocrats, Walsh and Jordan reposition him at the story's core, which is well-deserved. Cooke was not just a regicide driven by revenge; he was a forward-thinking political thinker of the revolutionary era: a barrister advocating for low-income clients, proposing what resembled a national health service, opposing debt imprisonment, and aiming to limit capital punishment. His tragic end—betrayed, hunted, and executed as a traitor serves as a stark symbol of what the Restoration aimed to erase: not only the king’s killers but also the social and political ideas they briefly embodied.

Walsh and Jordan show that for most regicides, the king's execution was not inevitable. Cooke originally anticipated some form of reconciliation with the monarchy. It was only through direct pressure from the New Model Army soldiers determined to hold “that man of blood” accountable—that the trial proceeded to its conclusion. This challenges conservative historiography, which often views the execution as either accidental or driven by a small group of zealots. The authors effectively incorporate Geoffrey Robertson’s argument that the trial was essentially the first war-crimes prosecution in history, and Robertson’s comparison of the persecution of the regicides to Stalin’s purges of the old Bolsheviks is an analogy that, despite its limitations, highlights both as retaliatory measures against earlier revolutionary figures.

The Limits of Whig Republicanism

The book’s limitations become evident here. Walsh and Jordan adopt a broadly Whig or left-liberal republican perspective, portraying the revolution as a progressive constitutional milestone. They see the regicides as principled men, whose downfall stemmed from personal revenge and dynastic backlash. While this view allows them to praise the regicides' bravery and sympathise with their tragic ending, it stops short of addressing the crucial question: why was the Restoration able to succeed?

Charles II’s return to England in 1660 was influenced not only by revenge or court politics, though these stories are often highlighted. Instead, a major shift among the propertied and mercantile classes enabled it, as they had previously supported Parliament against the Crown. By the late 1650s, these groups feared radicalism among soldiers, sailors, and apprentices more than a weakened monarchy. The republic’s leadership, growing more conservative and anxious, hesitated to mobilise the popular forces crucial for its survival. This hesitation created a political void that paved the way for the Restoration.Walsh and Jordan register this failure only in passing, largely through the personal drama of betrayal. But the betrayal had an economic and class content that cannot be ignored.

General Monck and the Political Economy of Counter‑Revolution

The book’s discussion of General George Monck offers valuable insight. Monck, who was Cromwell’s former commander in Scotland, switched allegiances for a yearly fortune of £100,000 and handed over the army along with the last military safeguard of the revolution to the Restoration. Walsh and Jordan highlight this as a significant act of treachery, and rightly so. However, it was not merely an isolated instance of personal opportunism; it also signified the wider failure of the republic’s leadership to secure support among the very groups copyholders, soldiers, and the urban poor whose enthusiasm had propelled the revolution in the 1640s.

Materialist historians of the revolution argue that the counter-revolution succeeded mainly because the republic’s leadership withdrew from the social implications of its own political goals. The Levellers were suppressed, radical Army members marginalised, and those with low incomes denied the reforms they had fought for. By the late 1650s, the republic was no longer a revolutionary force; it had become a conservative regime without broad popular support. Monck’s betrayal symbolised this shift. Walsh and Jordan, however, do not address this argument directly. Their account is detailed but lacks analysis, tracing the search for change without exploring the social forces that made it possible.

Memory, Repression, and the Afterlife of Revolution

Despite its limitations, The King’s Revenge offers significant insights. A particularly notable moment is when approximately twenty thousand people attend the funeral of a regicide decades after the Restoration. This detail, highlighted by the authors, shows that republican sentiment—and the hopes of the revolution—remained alive long after the 1660s political setback. While the Restoration could execute individuals, it could not completely erase the ideas they stood for.

Ultimately, the book examines how a restored ruling order will go to extreme lengths to punish those who once challenged it. It focuses on the violence needed to reestablish monarchical authority after a revolution that temporarily transferred sovereignty to ordinary people. It also reminds us that understanding this punishment requires understanding the social forces that made restoration possible.

Conclusion: The Regicides and the Politics of Historical Memory

Walsh and Jordan offer a compelling and accessible overview of the fate of the regicides. Their book highlights a group of individuals—particularly Cooke—whose ideas deserve much wider acknowledgement than they have historically received. However, the core importance of their story extends beyond the dramatic search; it also reveals the political economy of counter-revolution. The regicides were pursued not just for killing a king, but because they symbolised a challenge to the social order itself. Their punishment was part of a larger effort to reassert the authority of property, hierarchy, and monarchy. This effort succeeded because the republic lacked the courage to rely on the popular forces that had originally supported it. "The King’s Revenge" recounts the punishment, while a comprehensive history would also include the story of its defeat.

 

Comments on Alex Callinicos’s review of Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?

These are some observations made by Chris Thompson on Alex Callinicos’s review of Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? For some reason the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) did not post these comments on their website.  

Calinicos's review can be viewed at http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=869. In the near future I shall review Davidson’s book for my own blog.

 This review offers a clear expression of the ever-widening gulf between modern academic research and writing on the events of the 1640s in the British Isles and an approach based on a Marxist, indeed Trotskyite, analysis.

 The prolific use of terms like ‘bourgeoisie’, ‘feudal’ and ‘modern’ aristocracy, ‘proletariat’ and ‘non-bourgeois strata of the middle class’ invites comparison with the debates of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s historians’ group in the late-1940s and early-1950s recently edited by David Parker. Antique concepts like the claim that a class of urban capitalists were developing in the sixteenth century with feudalism or that these people were held to be socially inferior and were excluded from power by Absolute States are given vigorous exercise.

‘Bourgeois’ revolutions inevitably occurred and, in their outcomes, promoted capitalism. There is also an undertow of historiographical controversy: Callinicos’s protest against the revisionist historians of the 1970s is linked to an attack on ‘Political Marxists’ like Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood for their assistance in undermining a more authentically Socialist interpretation.

It is easy to see where the origins of this interpretation can be found. Neil Davidson and Alex Callinicos have recognised that, between 1500 and 1800, the basis for a new form of society was laid down. As a matter of Marxist theology, they believe that the transition to capitalism could not have been achieved peacefully but required a violent break-through, in other words, a ‘bourgeois revolution’. It was logical, therefore, to assume that such ‘bourgeois revolutions’ could be identified in the revolt of the Low Countries against Spanish rule in the latter part of the sixteenth-century and in the violent Puritan Revolution of the 1640s in England.

The motive force for these and later such revolutions was that of a productive bourgeoisie hampered by the protective system of absolute monarchs and a feudal aristocracy. Only in England, where the bourgeoisie was better developed and represented in Parliament, was capitalism able to triumph. A new form of economic organisation was established and industrial capitalism was subsequently able to transform the world.

The profound problems with such arguments and assumptions were obvious six or seven decades ago. It is straightforward enough to claim that economic changes occurred in England in the course of the seventeenth-century and that the country’s economy was more advanced in 1700 than in 1600. But is has never been shown that these changes precipitated the English Revolution or that the economy of 1700 would have been more backward had the English Revolution not occurred. The Revolution itself was undoubtedly immensely costly in human and animal lives, in demographic terms and in the destruction of property. That it forwarded the development of capitalism remains unproven.

There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the bourgeoisie headed the 1648 revolution despite Callinicos’s pleadings or that the bourgeoisie was allied to the ‘modern aristocracy’ – who were they? – against the monarchy, the feudal aristocracy and the established – in fact, disestablished – Church at that time. The idea of the existence, real or potential, of a non-bourgeois strata of the middle class or of an embryonic proletariat is completely anachronistic.

There was no victory of bourgeois ownership over feudal ownership, no evidence of the abandonment of primogeniture, of competition over the guilds, etc. 

The new economy, the new historiography, the new philosophy and the new science of the post-Restoration period was as much the work of former Royalists as of former Parliamentarians. None of this was stifled by the return of the King, the House of Lords and the Church of England. Tories and Whigs alike contributed to the defenestration of James II in 1688-89 and to the emergence of Britain as a major military and naval power.

The political and religious lessons of the Interregnum had been learnt: there was to be no return to such chaos. In 1640, political and religious fissures could be found across all ranks of English society but they were not based on class or on the rise of a bourgeoisie or on the opposition of a reactionary monarchy or aristocracy or church. After 1660, there was a deep-seated determination never to let such divisions lead to Civil Wars again: slowly, the constitutional machinery to accommodate political and religious differences was put in place.

But these changes have yet to be shown to have been due to the rise of the bourgeoisie or of capitalism. It has, indeed, yet to be shown that there was a ‘bourgeois revolution’ at all. That is why it cannot be found in the works of early modern historians and why the assumptions of Callinicos and Davidson are fallacious and unconvincing.   

A Sympathetic Portrait That Evades the Hard Questions: Peter Gaunt’s Oliver Cromwell

Peter Gaunt’s contribution to the British Library’s Historic Lives series appears, at first glance, as a prime example of accessible scholarship: concise, well-illustrated, and written with a smooth fluency that suits general readers. However, accessibility does not equate to neutrality, and ease of reading does not imply clarity. Gaunt’s biography is influenced by a tradition that views Cromwell not as a complex historical figure, but as a national hero—an icon to be admired, whose contradictions are downplayed, whose violence is explained away, and whose political actions are presented in a morally acceptable light.

A partisan historian in respectable guise

Gaunt’s enduring connection with the Cromwell Association reflects more than coincidence. It embodies an institutional perspective that views Cromwell as a largely virtuous figure, someone whose genuine religious faith and personal integrity offset the more severe parts of his history. This isn’t purely analysis; it leans toward commemorative sentiment. While the language might be scholarly, the core motivation is akin to hagiography.

The old Whig historians were at least honest. Macaulay saw Cromwell’s army as a symbol of a new social era, embodying the disciplined and ideological spirit of the rising bourgeoisie’s historical purpose. Gaunt’s portrayal of Cromwell is more cautious and guarded, yet it shares the same underlying sympathy. He depicts Cromwell as a man ahead of his time—more restrained than driven by circumstances, and more decent than ruthless. The political significance of the English Revolution is reduced to a narrative focused on personal character.

Ireland: the unresolved centre of the book

Gaunt’s evasions are most evident in Ireland. By portraying Cromwell’s campaign as typical of actions by a “figure of the rising bourgeois class” under pressure, he ostensibly appeals to a structural explanation. However, this framing effectively normalizes what was actually a campaign of colonial terror and economic dispossession.

Drogheda and Wexford were not isolated incidents; they were the violent catalysts for a substantial redistribution of land, wealth, and political influence. Cromwell was not just the leader managing this process—he also directly benefited financially from the resulting settlement. Ignoring this financial motivation as a mere side note rather than recognizing it as essential to understanding his actions overlooks a crucial point: Ireland was not simply a tragic chapter in Cromwell’s life but a fundamental manifestation of the economic principles driving the English Revolution. Gaunt’s biography does not confront this. It cannot confront it without abandoning its sympathetic frame. 

History without theory

The lack of a theoretical framework is deliberate, reflecting a political stance rather than a stylistic one. Gaunt’s narrative avoids engaging with key analytical questions that would clarify the revolution as a conflict among social forces. Scottish Presbyterianism is only briefly addressed. The dissolution of the Rump Parliament is depicted as a simple political maneuver, ignoring the influence of radical factions within the army. The Levellers are mentioned only in passing, serving as mere background. The detailed class dynamics—such as economic motivations, ideological conflicts, and social tensions—are largely missing. This discussion highlights that Gaunt’s limitation is part of a wider pattern in modern history writing. There is a trend away from social explanations, a focus on biography over analysis, and a hesitation to place individuals within class struggles. Consequently, Cromwell is often depicted as a solitary moral figure—flawed yet admirable and ultimately decent—rather than as a political leader representing a rising bourgeoisie whose victory depended on dismantling the feudal system and violently reshaping property relations.

An accessible introduction, not a guide to understanding

Gaunt’s book possesses notable strengths. It is clearly written, visually appealing, and careful in its treatment of mythologized material. For those awaiting John Morrill’s upcoming editions of Cromwell’s writings, it provides a handy introduction. However, an intro that portrays Cromwell as a sympathetic, depoliticized figure responsible for significant colonial violence does not prepare readers to fully understand Cromwell or the revolution he spearheaded. It’s best viewed as a starting point—one that should be complemented by exploring the social, economic, and ideological histories that Gaunt’s restrained volume largely omits.

 

Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger's Life and Legacy (Revolutionary Lives) Hardcover – 9 Nov. 2012 by John Gurney

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

Dr John Gurney is fast becoming a leading authority on the Diggers and their leader Gerrard Winstanley. He is the author of a previous book on the Diggers called Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution and also the author of several papers on the Diggers. Gurney's latest book is a result of a paper published from 1994.[1] He regularly lectures on Winstanley.

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

Gurney's biography runs to just over 162 pages. It would be a mistake, however, to believe that the book is academically or intellectually 'light '. It is nothing of the sort. Nor should it be treated as an introductory to Winstanley, the reader to get the best out of this book should at least have a rudimentary knowledge of the Digger leader and the Diggers struggle.

Gurney's introduction sets the tone for the rest of the book in the respect that it attempts to place his work in the context of previous 'left-wing' or 'Marxist' historiography.

The sign of a good book is that it tells us something new.  Gurney's work can be seen as development on from the work of Christopher Hill and others.

It is well known that previous Marxist's had written on the English revolution. Gurney elaborates that the Russian revolutionaries paid particular attention to the writings of Winstanley so much so that Vladimir Lenin the then leader of the fledgling Soviet state issued a decree that a previous Tsarist monument was to be changed with names of former revolutionaries replacing old figures of earlier Russian history. Winstanley's name appeared eighth on the list.

For their revolution, the Russian revolutionaries were able to draw on the experiences of revolutionaries from England and France. Winstanley had no such experience to draw upon. This, in some respect, shows why the revolutionaries had such an empirical outlook.

On the plus side, the English revolutionaries were as Ann Talbot explains "well-grounded enough in history to identify new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they appeared—as the ideologists of the revolution ransacked the Bible and half-understood historical precedent for some kind of theory to explain what they were doing".[2]

The book is well researched and for such a small work shows many years of hard, painstaking research. The result is a very readable narrative. The book is extremely informative and thought-provoking.

It is perhaps only recently that the words of Winstanley have been fully appreciated. Gerrard Winstanley's 'extraordinarily rich body of writings' were little read and even less written upon between the years 1651 and the 1890s. It was only after an explosive revolutionary era encompassing the late 19th and early 20th centuries that his writings were systematically studied and written about. The first to do so were the early Marxists and later the group of historians around the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Gurney is clear that the study of Winstanley should be not solely of historical value but must have a contemporary resonance. He says: Today, knowledge of Winstanley is widespread, and he has become one of the best-known figures from the period of the English Revolution. There have been numerous plays, novels, TV dramas, songs and films, and Winstanley has often been cited as an inspirational figure by politicians of the left. More specifically, his ideas and achievements have remained prescient, inspiring generations of activists and social movements" his name he continues "has in recent years also been invoked by freeganism, squatters, guerrilla gardeners, allotment campaigners, social entrepreneurs, greens and peace campaigners; and both Marxists and libertarians have laid claim to him as a significant precursor".[3]

Knowledge of Gerrard Winstanley's early life is a bit sketchy. He was born 1609, and as one writer put it he was "one of the most extraordinary and engaging figures to emerge during the English Revolution of 1640 – 60".

He was the son of an Edward Winstanley. In 1630 he moved to London and took up an apprenticeship, and in 1638, he was a freeman of the Merchant Tailors' Company. His adult life is unremarkable he married Susan King, who was the daughter of London surgeon William King, in 1639. It is clear that without the English Civil War, his life would have moved at the same pedestrian pace as before. But like many, his world was turned upside down. His business took a beating during the early part of the war, and in 1643 he was made bankrupt. He moved to Cobham, Surrey, where he found menial work as a cowherd.

It was at Cobham in Surrey that the Diggers movement was founded. Winstanley believed that the land was a "common treasury for all". He began to recruit like-minded people and began to work the ground on St George's Hill in the summer of 1649.

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

Where does Gurney's book fit in today's historiography of the English Revolution? Until quite recently little has been written on the Digger movement. This has been largely down to the fact that over the last few decades historiography on the English revolution has been dominated by a large group of revisionist historians who have sought to move away from any Marxist understanding of the English revolution.

According to Michael Braddick, revisionists have "have tried to cut the English revolution down to size or to cast it in its terms. In so doing, they naturally also cast a critical eye over the reputation and contemporary significance of its radical heroes".[4]

Given that Mark Kishlansky is one of those arch revisionists mentioned by Braddick, it seems a bit strange that  Kishlanskywrote of the book "This is a clear-eyed yet sympathetic account of one of the most baffling figures of the English Revolution. Gurney's painstaking research provides a wealth of new information that is assembled into a highly readable narrative. An informative and thought-provoking book."

Kishlansky despite recommending Gurney's book is keen to downplay the role of Winstanley who according to him was "a small businessman who began his career wholesaling cloth, ended it wholesaling grain, and in between sandwiched a mid-life crisis of epic proportions. The years when the world was turned upside down stand in the same relation to the course of English history as Winstanley's wild years either side of his fortieth birthday does to his subsequent life as a churchwarden".[5]

Gurney's work on the Digger's represents opposition to this revisionism. I am not saying that it accounts for a new form of historiography, but it does mean that opposition to present-day revisionism is beginning.It is also no accident that interest in Winstanley coincides with one of the biggest crisis to the capitalist system we have witnessed since the 1920s and 1930s..

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

In a previous essay, Gurney elaborates on why the Digger's achieved a level of local support in Cobham "Local support for the Diggers may also have been connected with Cobham's marked traditions of social conflict. The manor of Cobham, a former possession of Chertsey Abbey, had passed into the hands of Robert Gavell in 1566 and was to remain with his family until 1708. During the later sixteenth century the Gavell family became involved in a long and protracted series of disputes with their tenants. In a case brought in the court of Requests by William Wrenn, a Cobham husbandman, Robert Gavell was accused of overturning manorial customs and of infringing his tenants' rights, by seeking to extract more rent than was customarily paid, and by spoiling the timber on Wrenn's copyhold. He was also charged with attempting to escape the payment of tax by shifting the burden on to his tenants, laying 'a hevy burden uppon the poorer tennants contrarye to the Ancient usage, equitie and Consciens'Actions against Robert Gavell and his son Francis were resumed in the court of Chancery during the 1590s by tenants seeking to halt the continued assault on manorial custom".[6]

It has been suggested that Winstanley was proto-communist and early Marxist but as Geoff Kennedy commented in his Digger Radicalism and Agrarian Capitalism Winstanley should also be placed in the context of his times. Winstanley's thought and writings were profoundly religious, and as the former Marxist writer, Cliff Slaughter said "for the understanding of some of the great problems of human history, the study of religion is a necessity. What is the relationship between the social divisions among men and their beliefs about the nature of things? How do ruling classes ensure extended periods of acceptance of their rule by those they oppress? Why was the 'Utopians' wrong in thinking that it was sufficient only to work out a reasonable arrangement of social relations to proceed to its construction? It was out of the examination of questions like this in the German school of criticism of religion that Marx emerged to present for the first time a scientific view of society. 'The criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism."[7]

To conclude, I would say that this no hagiography. Gurney is not blind to Winstanley's weaknesses. He outlines that some of Winstanley's ideas were not progressive, or that his attitude towards women's emancipation was not the same towards men. Having said that Gurney's book has the look of a labour of love. The author even goes as far as to include his photos with the text. Gerrard Winstanley is an important book and should be read by academics and the general public alike and for all those in favour of a "common treasury for all".

---

[1] Gurney, J, 1994 Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger Movement in Walton and Cobham, Hist J, 37(4), 775–802

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

[3] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-08-31/diggers-land-and-direct-activisim/

[4] https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/07/the-digger-years.html

[5] Radical Prophet: The Mystics, Subversives and Visionaries Who Foretold the ...

  By Christopher Rowland

[6] http://www.academicroom.com/article/gerrard-winstanley-and-digger-movement-walton-and-cobham

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

W.H.Coates on the ‘Major Conflicts in Seventeenth-Century England’

(This is an article written by Chris Thompson. I do not know much about Wilson H Coates but I would like to publish Chris's article here. The Storm over the Gentry is a complex debate and although it took place over half a century ago the debate is still relevant to today's historiography on the English revolution.)

The ferocious debates over the fortunes of the English aristocracy and gentry that dominated historical debates over the origins and course of the English Revolution in the 1940s and 1950s were played out by the mid-1960s. They are now distant memories, best known probably for the methodological issues they raised and polemical edge to the exchanges between R.H.Tawney and Lawrence Stone on one side and Hugh Trevor-Roper and J.P.Cooper on the other. Undergraduates and, perhaps, postgraduates are most likely to come across this disputed territory when reading J.H.Hexter’s discussion of the ‘storm over the gentry’ and R.C.Richardson’s comments in his work on the historiography of the  Revolution. Assessments by other scholars – by W.H.Coates, Christopher Hill and Perez Zagorin, for example, - are less familiar or even forgotten.

This neglect of their views lends them interest. The first of these figures, Willson H.Coates, contributed an essay on the ‘Analysis of Major Conflicts in Seventeenth-Century England’ to the festschrift published in Wallace Notestein’s honour in 1960. It had originally been given at the meeting of the American Historical Association in December, 1956 to which Hexter and Zagorin had also given papers. It would have been fascinating to have been present then as a fly on the wall. In its apparently revised version, Coates began by addressing the claims of an American historian, Alexander Thomson, on the significance of the crises through which England passed in the seventeenth-century before moving on to discuss the rival claims of English historians since then. I am not going to comment on his discussion  of Alexander Thomson’s views but rather to focus my attention on his analysis of the claims and counter-claims of Tawney, Trevor-Roper and others, which formed the bulk of his essay.

Coates’s analysis focused initially on the Whig interpretation of the English Revolution. Whigs, he argued, viewed it as “essentially a war of ideas concerning religion and politics which rent families and divided members of the ruling gentry class. The seventeenth century was the crucial period in the emergence of constitutional government and of religious and intellectual freedom in England. Whether or not such a result was the intent of the Puritans, the Parliamentarians, the Cromwellians or the Restoration Whigs, it was – partly because powerful opponents of their particular views survived – their main historical achievement.” There is little or nothing in this to which Whig historians from Hallam and Macaulay to G,M,Trevelyan might have objected.

The most formidable assault on the Whig version of the English Revolution had, however, been made by R.H.Tawney according to Coates. He had found the cause of this political upheaval in antecedent social change and had described the economic transformations in England after 1540 to which political institutions had had to be adjusted to meet the requirements of a new social structure. Coates was not, however, convinced by this argument. Tawney’s hypothesis was not adequately linked in his view to the events in the early-1640s it was meant to explain. Tawney himself had conceded as much in his introduction to Brunton and Pennington’s book on the members of the Long Parliament’s House of Commons when he admitted that, as far as the members of the lower House were concerned, divisions between Royalists and Parliamentarians had little to do with diversities of economic interest and social class: even so, Tawney evidently still hankered after an explanation based on economic divisions amongst the ruling elite in and after 1642. Coates’s conclusion was that Tawney’s pre-occupation with underlying causation prevented him from appreciating that there had been other possible outcomes to the events of 1637-1642 and that he had thus failed to account for the English Revolution.

Essentially, Coates stated or re-stated the standard objection of historical empiricists to all forms of economic and social determinism, namely, that the connection between events and their assumed causes had not been made. Lawrence Stone’s progress from a view of the Revolution as “inevitable” in 1948 to one in which the old regime was overthrown peacefully in 1640-1641 and subsequently on to one in which the political struggle could no longer be explained primarily in economic terms was discussed more summarily. Despite his remaining reservations about Stone’s approach to the Civil Wars of the 1640s, Coates was apparently sympathetic to this evolution in Stone’s thinking.

He was much more critical of Trevor-Roper’s hypothesis about the fortunes of the declining and mere gentry. The idea that the Country-house radicalism of the mere gentry might lead either to Catholic desperation or Puritan Independency struck him as implausible. Indeed, the historical irresponsibility of this kind of diagnosis deserved to be ‘anatomized’ itself in the Trevor-Roper manner. Moreover, neither the declining gentry nor the Puritan Independents could be held to have controlled events between 1637 and 1642. And those M.P.s recruited to the House of Commons after the start of the Civil Wars were scarcely more radical than those elected in the autumn of 1640. Changes in the composition of county committees in a more radical direction after 1642 were hardly enough to vindicate Trevor-Roper’s contentions. Once again, the substance of Coates’s objections appear to lie in the inability of such claims to sustain a secure political analysis.

Interestingly enough, Coates had relatively little, if anything, to say about the validity of manorial counts as guides to changing economic fortunes or on the relative rewards of Court office compared to those from landownership that had preoccupied his colleagues in England. He was not opposed in principle to deploying insights gained into the operation of economic and social forces but thought that the dialectical methods of Tawney and Trevor-Roper belonged to “a kind of scholastic world of twentieth-century economic history.” Coates preferred the complex analysis to be found in C.V.Wedgwood’s narrative works and seventeenth-century realities presented in those of William Haller. “Major historical changes can be analysed only on assumptions of multiple causation and the intricate interdependence of a succession of events.”

Coates did, however, have his own analytical framework to suggest. Three categories of conflict in seventeenth-century England might be distinguished. First of all, there was the “continuous social conflict” of interest to economic historians. A good deal was known about the price revolution of 1540-1640, about the expansion of banking, commerce and industry, the sale of Crown and former monastic lands and the shifting patterns of property ownership among the aristocracy and gentry, industrialists, merchants and yeomen. “Innumerable shifts in property divided members of a class, cut across the well-demarcated class lines and effected new combinations of interest” even if the social revolution was a silent one incapable of large-scale organization. Such vast social changes did not culminate in one single historical event but could be seen, for example, in the political legislation of the Long Parliament in 1641 and in the uncontested sway of mercantilist doctrines later in the century. This category of social conflict had strong economic roots and was “closely related to the emergence of modern Western capitalism.” Calvinism, as Weber and Tawney had argued, placed an emphasis of prudence, industry and frugality, which were the appropriate ideological tools for the accumulation of wealth, including land. It was, Coates claimed, “a moulding factor in economic conflict and change.”

The second distinct category identified by Coates concerned the issues contemporaries thought they were fighting about, i.e. over the roles of the royal prerogative, of Parliament and the judiciary as well as the character of the State Church. In essence, the nineteenth-century picture of the conflict was right although the part of the Tories in the post-1688 settlement needed to be recognised alongside that of the Whigs.

Finally, there was “the real class conflict that loomed up in the mid-seventeenth century” with rising demands from the lower classes articulated by the Levellers and the Diggers. Behind these radical movements lay social and economic discontent. But they were premature and hopeless: the threat of social revolution was easily crushed. Even so, these movements had drawn on intellectual and social circumstances that permitted free discussion and the democratic tendencies of English Puritanism. Religious ideas and concepts of natural law as well as a selective reading of history and law fashioned Levellers’ demands.

What remained to be explained was the relationship between the two main factors in these conflicts, the political and the religious. In 1641, men were concerned with both: by 1688, they were obviously more secularly minded.

The ground upon which Coates chose to stand was clearly demarcated. He saw the economic and social changes of the period up to the English Revolution as critical to its explanation and focused on the influence of Calvinism and the rise of Capitalism as fundamental. Broadly speaking, he accepted the Whig interpretation of political and religious conflicts in the course of the seventeenth-century and an explanation in terms of class conflict for the appearance of the Levellers and Diggers in the late-1640s. The idea of an abortive revolution from below would have appealed to Christopher Hill.

But the objections Coates had made against Tawney’s case for the ‘rise of the gentry’ could have been made with equal validity against his own analytical framework. The economic and social changes he postulated in the century before 1640 were not linked either to the key events of 1637-1642 or to the subsequent period. His approach was based on the old claims of Marx, Weber and Tawney for Calvinism and the rise of Calvinism. This was the Tawney thesis shorn of its untenable statistics and without its analytical failings.

Secondly, of course, Coates gave succour to the Whig interpretation that economic and social explanations were supposed to have rendered redundant. He himself shared the presuppositions of economic and social determinism at the same time as he protested against such preconceptions. Logically, he could not begin by making such a protest and then end by offering a synthesis of the two.

Finally, there is the matter of his use of the language of ‘class’ and of ‘class conflict’. Contemporaries did not use such terminology and the consensus of historical opinion is that attempts to apply these terms to seventeenth-century English society have failed, although some, if not very many, historians believe they can be deployed in this way. When Coates wrote that Royalists and Parliamentarians alike found “the rising demands from the lower classes were ominous” and that the Levellers and Diggers constituted a “social revolutionary movement”, he was using anachronistic language and testifying to his own antique intellectual equipment.

This is why this essay from a mature historian in his prime was so conservative. It is in part confused. It is in part confusing because it has nothing new to offer. The powerful stimulus that the ‘storm over the gentry’ had already given to studies of the origins and course of the English Revolution in economic and social history, in county and urban history was never recognised by Coates. That, perhaps, more than anything explains why his comments have languished in obscurity for so long. 

Comrade Jacob and the Class Limits of the English Revolution: A Marxist Reappraisal

Introduction: A Lost Alternative and Its Historical Moment

Over three and a half centuries after a small group of dispossessed people started digging on common land at St George’s Hill, the questions their actions raised—about the origins of property, the meaning of freedom in a market economy, and who has the right to the land—remain unanswered. David Caute’s "Comrade Jacob," first published in 1961 and reissued in 1973, revisits this event not as a historical curiosity but as a serious exploration of one of the truly radical perspectives from the English Revolution: the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley.

Caute wrote the novel during a specific political period. The crisis within the Communist Party following the Soviet-led suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 led a new generation of intellectuals to explore fresh perspectives on radicalism, dissent, and the betrayal of revolutionary ideals. Influenced by his years at Oxford studying with Christopher Hill, Caute turned to the seventeenth century not as an escape from current issues but to analyse them. Therefore, Comrade Jacob is not a nostalgic costume drama but a political novel in a historical context — an exploration of how poor movements emerge, are suppressed, and how religious beliefs and social revolts are connected.

Caute’s novel effectively portrays the importance of the revolution. However, its limitations, along with those of the historiographical tradition it draws from, reveal essential aspects of the class character of the English Revolution and the role of the Diggers in history. Comprehending Caute’s work is crucial for understanding the revolution's boundaries.

The Diggers as Pre‑Proletarian Communists

Caute’s novel and most sympathetic portrayals of the Diggers highlight that they “had no coherent programme for transforming society and never contemplated overturning it by force.” While accurate, the more profound question is why. The answer is rooted not in psychology but in class background. The Diggers originated from dispossessed small producers, rural workers, demobilised soldiers, cottagers, and artisans squeezed by agrarian capitalism. They were not, in the modern sense, proletarians. The industrial working class—the social force capable of abolishing private property in the means of production—had not yet formed. As a result, the Diggers exemplify a form of pre-proletarian communism: a utopian ideal born of hardship but lacking the social power to realise its goals.

Engels’ distinction in "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" is crucial here. Utopian socialists could highlight societal flaws and envision a better future, but they could not identify the class that could realise it. Winstanley fits this tradition. His idea of a “common treasury for all” was morally compelling and historically necessary, yet it was not achievable in the 1640s. This isn't a moral critique but a historical-materialist one. The tragedy of St George’s Hill isn't that Winstanley was prematurely Lenin; it's that the Diggers represented hopes extending beyond the bourgeois revolution, which was the only revolution on the table in the 1640s. Their defeat was rooted in the revolution's class structure.

Christopher Hill, Caute, and the Stalinist “People’s History” Tradition

Caute’s novel is deeply rooted in the historiographical tradition that influenced it. Christopher Hill’s significant contribution—defining the English Revolution as a bourgeois revolution—was groundbreaking. However, Hill’s work also reflected the constraints of the Stalinist “People’s History” tradition, such as prioritising a national over an international perspective, romanticising religious sects, viewing history through a Popular Front lens that grouped rebels into a continuous “radical tradition", and lacking a thorough analysis of the rational, scientific, and materialist aspects of the revolution.

Caute inherits these strengths and weaknesses. His structural device — alternating Winstanley’s first-person voice with a detached authorial perspective — is a genuine literary achievement. But the framework remains essentially national. The English Revolution was not a self-contained eruption of English radicalism. It was part of a continental crisis stretching from the Thirty Years’ War to the Fronde. The ideological currents coursing through it — natural rights theory, anti-monarchical republicanism, radical scriptural hermeneutics — were European phenomena. A novel that situated the Diggers more fully in this international context would have captured something essential about the revolution’s character.

The Diggers and the Pseudo‑Left: Two Movements Without a Revolutionary Class

The Diggers of 1649 and today’s pseudo-left seem vastly different at first. One excavated the commons in Surrey; the other engages in ideological battles on social media. However, both reveal the same underlying issue: a social group expressing aspirations they cannot fulfil due to a lack of class power. The Diggers were not proletarians but dispossessed small producers, rural workers, and demobilised soldiers—victims of primitive accumulation rather than architects of a new social order. Their genuine, even heroic, communism was rooted in pre-proletarian conditions. They envisioned a “common treasury for all" but lacked the class consciousness and power to realise it.

Their strategy relied on moral appeal, scriptural argument, and the hope that Cromwell would complete the revolution for them. However, the English Revolution was fundamentally a bourgeois revolution, and Cromwell was its most consistent figure. While he could overthrow the monarchy, he couldn't eliminate private property. The Diggers were defeated not due to their errors but because they were ahead of their time.

The Pseudo‑Left: Moralism Without Class

The pseudo‑left is the modern equivalent of this limitation — not in content, but in structure. It is the politics of a middle‑class layer: academics, NGO professionals, media workers, identity‑politics entrepreneurs. Economically insecure, politically anxious, socially dependent on the existing order, it cannot imagine working‑class power and therefore retreats into moralism, identity, and therapeutic self‑expression.

Where the Diggers referenced scripture, the pseudo-left relies on privilege, representation, "harm," and symbolic gestures. Both favour appealing to authority over empowering the working class. The Diggers looked to Cromwell; the pseudo-left turns to HR departments, university officials, NGOs, and social media. Both seek protection from above instead of driving change from below.

The pseudo-left serves capitalism by fragmenting workers, replacing class analysis with moral accusations, substituting symbolic politics for real material struggle, and channelling anger into safe, state-controlled avenues. It is not a revolutionary force but an ideological containment mechanism—radical in rhetoric but conservative in effect.

What Caute Leaves Out

Caute briefly mentions the Putney Debates and the Presbyterian–Independent split, but these are more than mere omissions. They are pivotal points in the entire revolutionary process. In 1647 at Putney, the Levellers challenged the Army leaders over the franchise, marking a crucial moment when the bourgeois revolution set its boundaries. This debate was not theoretical; it reflected the recognition that extending political rights to the propertyless would threaten the foundations of the emerging capitalist order. Putney becomes the setting where the revolution defined its limits.

The dividing line in politics between Presbyterians and Independents was clear and impactful. Local Presbyterian gentry primarily led the effort to displace the Diggers from St George’s Hill. Fairfax, on behalf of the Independents, was hesitant to use force against them and did not actively defend them either. This was not simply a struggle between the poor and the wealthy. Instead, it was a conflict rooted in a revolution itself, split over the extent of social change desired.

Cromwell’s Role

Cromwell did not betray the revolution; he embodied its core principles. His suppression of the Levellers and disregard for the Diggers were not mistakes but acts of the revolution firming up its class limits. Trotsky’s observation in Where Is Britain Going? is crucial: the bourgeois revolution could topple the feudal monarchy but could not eliminate private land ownership. The Diggers aimed for goals beyond the revolution’s main objective. Their defeat was thus inevitable, not accidental.

Caute’s refusal to secularise Winstanley is one of the novel’s strengths. The film adaptation flattened Winstanley into a socialist-realist tribune, stripping away the mysticism, torment, and scriptural intensity inseparable from his politics.

This matters. The religious form was not a veil behind which a secular class consciousness was hiding. It was the ideological medium available to people of that class in that period. As Ann Talbot observed in her appraisal of Hill, the ideologues of the English Revolution “ransacked the Bible and half understood historical precedent for some kind of theory to explain what they were doing.”

But the religious form was also a limit. Millenarian Christianity could inspire the poor to dig the commons, but it could not provide a scientific analysis of class forces or a strategy for confronting state power. Winstanley’s appeals to Cromwell — “we are your brothers” — were not tactical manoeuvres. They were the strategy. They could not succeed.

Primitive Accumulation and Contemporary Resonance

Today, St George’s Hill stands as one of England’s most costly and heavily protected residential areas. While this fact appears ironic, it reflects a deeper historical continuity. Winstanley linked the origin of property to the “Norman yoke,” whereas Marx associated it with primitive accumulation. Both recognised that property isn’t an inherent right but a product of historical force and dispossession. The violent removal of the majority from the land isn’t a flaw of capitalism; it’s its very foundation. The housing crisis, land financialization, and the exclusion of the poor from cities aren’t anomalies but parts of a systemic process rooted in dispossession. The Diggers could dig the commons, but they couldn’t lay the foundations of capitalism, which were only beginning to be established. Today, we live after that process. The challenge is greater, but so is the social power we can harness to meet it.

The Unfinished Question

Comrade Jacob is not a perfect history book, but it genuinely helps by portraying the Diggers as real historical figures rather than romanticised forerunners. An even better book would explore their questions sincerely and delve into why they couldn’t find answers. That book still needs to be written. However, the question the Diggers raised — who has the right to land? — remains as pressing today as it was in 1649. It can't be resolved within capitalism's limits and requires a different class, a different revolution, and a new historical basis.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary and Seventeenth‑Century Sources

• Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom and Other Writings, ed. Christopher Hill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).
• Gerrard Winstanley, Selections from His Works, ed. Leonard Hamilton, introduction by Christopher Hill (London: 1944).
• The Clarke Papers, ed. C.H. Firth — essential for the Putney Debates.
• The Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660 — for state policy toward radicals.

Modern Scholarship on the Diggers

• John Gurney, Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2007). The most comprehensive modern study of the Diggers; covers St George’s Hill, Cobham, Iver, Wellingborough, and the wider political context.
• John Gurney, Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy (London, 2013). Important for understanding the modern reception and appropriation of Winstanley.
• Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Penguin, 1972). Classic Marxist treatment of sectarian radicalism; foundational but shaped by the “People’s History” tradition.
• Christopher Hill, The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley (Past & Present Supplement No. 5, 1978). Key text on Winstanley’s millenarianism.

Marxist Historiography and Theory

These works underpin the essay’s analysis of class limits, bourgeois revolution, and pre‑proletarian communism:

• Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I — chapters on primitive accumulation.
• Karl Marx, The German Ideology — on class, ideology, and historical development.
• Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific — essential for situating Winstanley as a pre‑scientific communist.
• Leon Trotsky, Where Is Britain Going? — the clearest Marxist analysis of Cromwell and the class character of the English Revolution.
• Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution — methodological model for analysing class forces and revolutionary limits.

On the Pseudo‑Left and Contemporary Politics

These works provide the theoretical grounding for the second half of the essay:

• David North, The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo‑Left (Mehring Books, 2015). The most systematic Marxist critique of identity politics and middle‑class radicalism.
• Chris Marsden & David North, The Heritage We Defend (Mehring Books, 1988). Essential for understanding the degeneration of Stalinism and the emergence of pseudo‑left tendencies.
• Ann Talbot, “Christopher Hill and the English Revolution,” World Socialist Web Site (2003). A sharp critique of Hill’s national‑popular framework and its political limitations.

Additional Contextual Works

• Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (1976). Strong on class structure and popular radicalism.
• Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford University Press, 2002). For broader political context.
• Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire (Allen Lane, 2008). A modern scholarly synthesis of the revolution.

Film and Cultural Reception

• Kevin Brownlow & Andrew Mollo, Winstanley (1975). Important for understanding the secularising distortion of Winstanley’s religious radicalism.

 

55 Days by Howard Brenton: A Drama of Revolution and Its Unresolved Legacy

Howard Brenton’s 55 Days, debuting at Hampstead Theatre in 2012, explores a pivotal moment in English history: the fifty-five days from the New Model Army’s takeover of Parliament to King Charles I’s execution in January 1649. Brenton clearly states his goal early on — “We are not just trying a tyrant, we are inventing a country” — and the play largely succeeds in making this idea convincing. Though it is less than a hundred pages, 55 Days encapsulates a much larger historical scope, including the fall of the Stuart monarchy, the division within the parliamentary-military alliance, and the rise of an English republic.

Cromwell, Charles, and the Drama of Reluctant Regicide

Brenton correctly emphasizes the connection between Cromwell and Charles as the core of the play. Historically, Cromwell was one of the last in the Parliamentary leadership to believe that executing the King was inevitable; during much of the Civil War, he favored a negotiated settlement that could have kept the monarchy intact in a constitutional form. Brenton effectively portrays this hesitation, illustrating that regicide was not the original aim of the war but resulted from Charles’s refusal to accept any restrictions on his authority.

Brenton's most significant liberty is his depiction of a face-to-face meeting between Cromwell and Charles during the trial, a scene that never actually happened. Such dramatic inventions have a long history, from Schiller’s Mary Stuart onwards, and Brenton employs it to heighten the tension. The issue isn't the invention itself but its impact: it risks turning a massive social and political upheaval into a private clash between two consciences. Cromwell’s restraint in late 1648 was influenced more by the complex power dynamics he faced, including an army radicalised beyond Parliament and a Leveller movement even more radicalised than the army. The play is most powerful when it hints at these broader pressures; it weakens when it reduces the conflict to personal psychology.

History as a Mirror of the Present

Brenton consistently uses historical drama to shed light on current political issues, and 55 Days follows this tradition. The play is rooted in a Brechtian approach where history is presented not as mere costume theater but as a debate on political action. While audiences unfamiliar with the period’s factions—Presbyterians, Independents, Levellers—might find it challenging, those willing to engage with the play discover a dynamic work that presents the English Revolution as an ongoing, relevant question rather than just a historical exhibit.

Brenton’s depiction of the regicide is largely historically accurate. He portrays the execution not as an act of personal revenge or religious justice, but as a crucial step for the emerging bourgeois class to eliminate the final barrier to consolidating their power. This represents the play’s most significant historical point, and Brenton openly acknowledges it.

The Levellers and Brenton’s Politics

The play notably includes John Lilburne and the Leveller movement, challenging many modern historical narratives that tend to underplay their significance. Brenton grants them a voice but moderates their political stance: notably, Lilburne’s opposition to regicide is left out, which could have intensified the drama rather than diminished it. Brenton’s sympathies are apparent in his work with Tariq Ali in the late 1990s, and the criticism from the British press over his satire of the Blair government has influenced his reputation. 55 Days reflects these commitments, emphasising the revolutionary nature of 1649 and resisting the conservative view that treats the period as merely a constitutional curiosity.

The mixed costuming in the Hampstead production—Charles wearing a Stuart collar and carrying a cane, while Cromwell and others sport clothing reminiscent of the 1940s—was criticized, yet it can be justified as highlighting the bourgeois nature of Parliament in contrast to the lingering feudalism of the Crown. Although this symbolism may not fully align with current scholarship, it effectively fulfills its theatrical role.

Conclusion: Remembering the Revolution

55 Days is not a flawless history play. Its central invented scene risks personalising a conflict rooted in class forces rather than individual conscience. Yet Brenton remains a serious dramatist, and his willingness to treat the English Revolution as a revolution — rather than as an aberration or a constitutional dispute — is itself a political act. He has recalled being told by a Frenchman that the English seem to have forgotten they had a revolution at all. 55 Days attempts to correct that forgetting. Modern English society, and many of its historians, remain reluctant to reckon with 1649 as a revolution in the full sense. A play willing to insist otherwise, whatever its dramatic compromises, performs a genuine service.

 

The Impact of the English Civil Wars — A Marxist Critique of the Revisionist Counter Revolution in Historiography

Introduction

The historiographical struggle over the English Civil War has never been a mere academic quarrel. It is a battle over the meaning of revolution itself. J.S. Morrill’s The Impact of the English Civil Wars (1991) stands as a defining statement of the revisionist school that, from the 1970s onward, sought to dismantle the Marxist interpretation forged by Christopher Hill and the Communist Party Historians’ Group. The revisionists rejected the English Revolution as a bourgeois revolution, denied the existence of a rising bourgeoisie, and insisted that the conflict was driven not by social transformation but by religious sensibilities and constitutional misunderstandings. Morrill and his allies “set out to demolish this framework,” replacing class analysis with a focus on “short-term political accidents” and local particularities that fragment the national narrative.¹

This historiographical turn did not arise in a vacuum. It coincided with the international shift to the right: the defeats of the working class, the collapse of the post-war consensus, the rise of Thatcher and Reagan, and the deepening crisis of Stalinism. In this climate, an academic orthodoxy emerged that denied the revolutionary character of the seventeenth century and, by implication, the possibility of revolutionary change in the present. The new orthodoxy insisted “there was no bourgeois revolution because there was no rising bourgeoisie,” a position that functioned to teach that “mass movements cannot fundamentally alter the social order.”² Morrill’s volume must therefore be understood not simply as a scholarly intervention but as a contribution to the intellectual counter‑revolution of the late twentieth century.

The Revisionist Project: Methodological Fragmentation as Ideology

The Marxist interpretation, developed most powerfully by Christopher Hill and the Communist Party Historians’ Group, located the English Civil War within the world‑historical process of bourgeois revolution. It understood the conflict as the overthrow of a feudal‑absolutist state by social forces aligned with emergent capitalist relations. Morrill and his revisionist colleagues—Conrad Russell, Kevin Sharpe, and others—explicitly set out to dismantle this framework. They denied “there was a rising bourgeoisie,” insisted that “people of all social classes fought on both sides,” and rejected the very notion of a revolution, portraying the conflict instead as a “contingent breakdown of the constitution that got out of hand.”³

This methodological shift was not innocent. The revisionists replaced structural analysis with short‑term political accidents, substituted national dynamics with micro‑studies of localities, and elevated religious discourse to an autonomous causal force. In doing so, they evacuated the conflict of its social content. The result was an historiography that dissolved the English Revolution into a series of disconnected episodes, stripped of class dynamics and historical necessity.

The Political Context: Revisionism and the Neoliberal Turn

The ascendancy of revisionism in the 1970s and 1980s coincided with profound political transformations: the defeats of the working class, the collapse of the post‑war consensus, the rise of Thatcherism and Reaganism, and the accelerating crisis of Stalinism. These developments created fertile ground for an academic orthodoxy hostile to the very idea of revolution.The new orthodoxy insisted “there was no bourgeois revolution because there was no rising bourgeoisie,” a position that functioned to teach that “mass movements cannot fundamentally alter the social order.”⁴

This was not merely a shift in scholarly fashion. It was the intellectual counterpart to the political counter‑revolution of the period. By denying the revolutionary character of the seventeenth century, revisionism implicitly denied the possibility of revolutionary change in the present.

The Flaws of Revisionism: A Caricature of Marxism

The revisionist claim that the presence of nobles on the Parliamentary side and commoners on the Royalist side disproves the class character of the conflict rests on a crude misunderstanding of Marxism. “No serious Marxist has ever expected a chemically pure revolution where every member of one class lines up neatly against every member of another.”⁵ The decisive question is not the social origins of individual participants but the class interests served by the contending forces and the objective historical outcomes of the struggle.

By these criteria, the English Civil War was unmistakably a bourgeois revolution. It abolished feudal tenures, destroyed the Crown’s independent executive power, established the supremacy of Parliament as an organ of the gentry and merchant classes, and cleared the path for capitalist agriculture and trade. These transformations were not accidental by‑products of a constitutional misunderstanding; they were the necessary results of deep‑seated social and economic contradictions.

Morrill’s insistence on religion as the primary cause is an evasion. The question is not whether religion mattered—of course it did—but why religious conflict assumed the forms it did at that specific historical moment. The rise of Puritanism, the proliferation of radical sects, and the ideological ferment of the 1640s cannot be understood apart from the processes of enclosure, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the broader dynamics of primitive accumulation. To treat religion as autonomous is to retreat into idealism.

The Stakes: Historical Materialism and the Meaning of Revolution

The revisionist dismissal of the English Revolution has implications far beyond seventeenth‑century studies. If the English Civil War was merely a constitutional accident or a religious quarrel, then the concept of bourgeois revolution itself collapses. And if bourgeois revolutions are mythical, then the Marxist conception of history—rooted in class struggle and the transformation of modes of production—is fatally undermined.

This is precisely the intellectual climate in which postmodernism, identity politics, and the rejection of “grand narratives” have flourished. The denial of the English Revolution is part of a broader ideological offensive against historical materialism.

Hill’s work, despite its limitations, remains valuable because it insists on what the revisionists deny: that the English Civil War was a revolution, that it was made by the mass of the population, and that it fundamentally transformed English society. Morrill’s volume, by contrast, must be read as a document of the intellectual counter‑revolution—a scholarly expression of the political reaction of the late twentieth century.

Conclusion

Morrill’s The Impact of the English Civil Wars is emblematic of a historiographical project that seeks to sever the English Revolution from its social foundations and to deny its revolutionary character. By elevating religion to an autonomous causal force, by dissolving national dynamics into local contingencies, and by caricaturing Marxism as a theory that demands “chemically pure” class alignments, the revisionists obscure the profound social transformations that shaped the conflict.⁶ The abolition of feudal tenures, the destruction of the Crown’s independent executive power, the rise of Parliament as the political instrument of the gentry and merchant classes, and the clearing of obstacles to capitalist development were not accidental by‑products of a constitutional crisis. They were the objective outcomes of a bourgeois revolution.

The stakes of this debate extend far beyond seventeenth‑century historiography. To deny the English Revolution is to deny the historical reality of bourgeois revolution itself, and with it the Marxist conception of history as the unfolding of class struggle. It is no coincidence that revisionism flourished alongside the rise of postmodernism, identity politics, and the repudiation of “grand narratives.” Morrill’s volume must therefore be read critically, not as a neutral scholarly contribution but as a document of the intellectual counter‑revolution that accompanied the political reaction of the late twentieth century. Against this, the Marxist tradition—despite its own internal contradictions—remains indispensable for understanding the English Civil War as a transformative moment in world history, a revolution made by the mass of the population and one that fundamentally reshaped the social order.

Notes

1. “Set out to demolish this framework… short-term political accidents.”
2. “There was no bourgeois revolution because there was no rising bourgeoisie… mass movements cannot fundamentally alter the social order.”
3. “There was no rising bourgeoisie… contingent breakdown of the constitution.”
4. “The prevailing academic orthodoxy is that there was no bourgeois revolution…”
5. “No serious Marxist has ever expected a chemically pure revolution…”
6. “The revisionist argument… reveals a crude, caricatured understanding of Marxism.”