Interview with Writer/Historian Tom Reilly

I recently came into contact with the Irish historian/writer Tom Reilly. His books have concentrated on many aspects of Oliver Cromwell’s controversial military and political campaign in Ireland. I have only started to read Tom’s last two books and would like to review them at a later date. I will therefore reserve comment on his work. I would welcome comments on this interview and Tom’s writing on Ireland and Cromwell.

Q What made you take up the study of history and especially your specialization of Cromwell in Ireland?

A I would love to say that I was always suspicious of the politicisation of Irish history and that my cynicism was piqued when it came to what we (Irish citizens) were being taught about Cromwell in Ireland but that’s not really true. Well, there is a grain of truth about it and that’s to do with me being a cynic, which I believe I am. I was one of those ‘question authority’ types when I wore a younger man’s clothes. (He didn’t seem to mind. ) However, the real reason why I took up this study is because I come from Drogheda – the scene of Old Ironsides’ most notorious deeds. Indeed, I now live in a house, the boundary of which was once the town wall, and furthermore it was into my garden that the breach in the walls was made and the Roundheads poured through in 1649.

I was brought up in this town. My family go back generations here. I used to hang around (what was left of) the town walls and was fascinated about the fact that Cromwell is supposed to have killed all of my ancestors. So, as a young adult, I decided to check the local records to see if there was anything to be gleaned there. And lo and behold, the records go back to the year 1649. In these records, there were the names of hundreds of Drogheda’s inhabitants whose daily lives continued through into the 1650s and beyond, all of whom showed very little signs of being massacred in cold blood. This was not a document (Drogheda Corporation records) that many historians had checked in the past, but it seemed obvious to me, even though I wasn’t a historian. I’m still not. That was the starting point. And I have never looked back since. 

Q Describe how difficult it was for an amateur writing in the current formally academic controlled climate.

A That’s quite an interesting question. So, to start at the beginning, it wasn’t long before I felt that I was on to something. So I wiped the slate clean and dismissed all I have ever heard about Cromwell and I began to read voraciously about the man – SR Gardiner, WC Abbott, Thomas Carlyle, Hillaire Belloc, Pauline Gregg, Ivan Roots, Peter Gaunt, John Morrill, etc. etc. all made an impact on me and none of them seemed to think that Cromwell was a complete bastard. Hmm. That’s odd. It was Antonia Fraser’s Cromwell, Our Chief of Men that gave me a real insight into his personality and as I kept on reading and reading it seemed to me that a pattern was beginning to emerge. Fr Denis Murphy (Cromwell in Ireland) and JP Prendergast (The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland) DMR Esson (The Curse of Cromwell) typified Irish attitudes to Cromwell, whereas English writers tended to be much more circumspect when it came to the stories of civilian atrocities. So I wasn’t alone. Gardiner in particular did not believe the war criminal allegations and copper-fastened my doubt that the stories of indiscriminate massacres of civilians might be just that, stories. That was enough for my cynicism to ignite and it continues to burn in flames today.

But what to do?

So in 1993, in the middle of my research, I wrote an amateurish book called Cromwell at Drogheda, which didn’t really say anything at all except explain the facts of the siege. It was for the local market (1,000 copies) and it sold out.

Finally, I had so much material assembled I decided to write another book. Strangely, for me, this was more about writing than it was about history. Like many amateur writers I wanted to be heard. I brought out (self-published) two more books on local history in the nineties and after completing the first draft of Cromwell, An Honourable Enemy, I sent it to a few publishers (70!!) to see if they’d bite, not for a minute thinking that any of them would.  Steve McDonogh (Brandon Books) rang me one day and I nearly fell out of my standing. He wanted to publish – but the book would need footnotes. I think I said something like, ‘I’m sorry, footwhats?’ Not a clue. I failed second level history at school, so I had absolutely no idea what he meant. Naturally I had encountered footnotes in all of my research because many of the books that I had read had footnotes, or endnotes (I still don’t know the difference, if there is a difference) or references of some sort. But could I actually do this? Me?!

To make a long story longer, I gave it a go. I vaguely knew that if you stated a fact you needed to reference it. So I copied the footnote style of others, (probably various others), went back through the manuscript (this was a hell of a memory test) to see if I could remember where I read this fact and that fact and the other fact. After several more months, I had the footnotes done. I had referenced all of the facts (well, those that I figured needed referencing, my editor never questioned them) that were in the text that identified the location where I got these same facts. Of course, little did I know that I had suddenly dipped my toe into the bewildering world of academia, a world, where a primary source reference can be compromised if that reference comes second-hand from a modern-day publication, or shock horror, if a comma is misplaced. I hadn’t a clue.  I simply thought it was good enough to say where I had read the fact. But hey, the publisher didn’t question my references so I seemed to be getting away with it. After another long wait the book was published. There was no going back now. I had definitely gotten away with it. A book with footnotes eh? Go me.

So what was the question? Oh yeah, how difficult it was writing in an academically controlled climate. Actually, it wasn’t difficult at all first time round. I had no idea that the climate was controlled by academia. But by Jaysus, do I know now!

The academics were horrified. They thought of me as if I was dirt on their shoe. Reviews in most of the national Irish newspapers were bad. ‘None of this is convincing’ said the Irish Times. ‘This is a painfully bad book’, said Dr Jason McElligott and he followed up with, ‘and it is tempting to suggest that its main use will be to teach students how not to conduct research, assess evidence or write prose.’ I was stunned. ‘But, the evidence, I cried. Look at the evidence’.

Thankfully, those without insular opinions embraced the book and its thesis. I began to realise that those who came out against it were simply showing themselves up. Cromwell didn’t massacre unarmed women and children. They knew/know it. Surely this is about balance. If you don’t buy my entire thesis then, c’mon historians, at least come out and agree that the teenagers, granddads, grannies, toddlers and babies of Ireland weren’t slaughtered by Cromwell in 1649. But I digress.

Q What do you make of the current historiography regarding Cromwell?

A I’m going to assume that this means Cromwell in Ireland. I have discovered that there is a vast difference between Irish attitudes and English attitudes (no kidding, right?) to Cromwell. Here is an excerpt from the opening chapter of my book, which succinctly explains what I make of it:

‘As the crow of antiquity flies, the early modern period is not really that far away in terms of distance in time, especially in Ireland where history has an irritating habit of not going away. This is something that we Irish know to our cost. History and myth have always been close companions; indeed, one is frequently mistaken for the other. Myth is a powerful tool that has been used to shape nations. The axiom that truth is the first casualty of war has rarely been in sharper focus than in seventeenth century Ireland. Irish history is strewn with colourful myths, many of which are associated with Oliver Cromwell.

Often given credit for being personally responsible for founding the British Empire, Cromwell is full of contradiction; a country squire who became an outstanding military commander; a king killer who was offered the crown and refused it; a champion of religious toleration who was terrified of the power of Catholicism; a party reveller who danced late into the night and who banned Christmas; a practical joker who became an enduring symbol of everything Puritanical.

Such is his murderous legacy, Cromwell features in a modern-day cult card game called Terror Top Chumps, a ‘politically charged version’ of the children’s card game Top Trumps (created by Fear Trade Ltd.) alongside Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Ivan the Terrible, Vlad the Impaler, Sadam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden; a total of thirty-two terrorists and dictators in all – and has a body count of 600,000 attributed to him. Not by coincidence, this figure has often been used as the entire number of people who died due to famine, pestilence and war during the Cromwellian period in Ireland.’

One of the main problems here is that the seventeenth century experts in Ireland seem extremely reluctant to accept a rehabilitated Cromwell and they still want to perpetuate myths. Oh, hang on, that’s the next question.

Q As you say in the preface you have received much criticism over your book how much do you think this was politically motivated.

A Political motivation is an excellent way of describing some of the hostility towards my work. Without getting personal there are some Irish historians who are very obviously nationalists and even if you took them back to 1649 in a time machine and showed them what happened and they saw it with their own eyes, they still wouldn’t believe it. This is a fact. (Well, inasmuch as it can be since time travel hasn’t been invented yet.)

It is always a source of amazement to me how one’s political inclinations can determine how one views history. It’s unlikely (although not impossible) that any member of Sinn Féin (for instance) would agree with me in a million years. Just not gonna happen. I think this is a tragedy of major proportions. This issue has been an accelerant in the incessant deterioration of Anglo-Irish relations over the years and it is one of the reasons why Ireland holds a huge grudge against England today. It fuels bigotry and insular thinking. Still today, an Irishman will point to Cromwell as the source of all of Ireland’s woes; the bastard that slaughtered whole Irish communities without batting an eyelid.

The biggest issue I have with politically motivated attitudes is the historians. There are many non-historians (lay people I suppose) who really don’t know any better and look to experts to tell them what to think. Well, nuts to that. I don’t need an expert to tell me what to think. I can make up my own mind. That’s why I didn’t use footnotes in my new book, Cromwell was Framed. I will see their book with footnotes and I will raise them a book that ordinary folk can read. And that’s why I reproduced most of the actual primary documents in this new book. There is no need for footnotes, because the documents are there for all to see. I didn’t want to hide behind a reference/footnote  that I have interpreted on behalf of Joe and Josephine Public. I included them so people can interpret them themselves. Besides, I wasn’t going down that road again. I have no idea how to assemble a footnote. So I’m not going to take on the historians at their own game. I’m going to take them on at mine. And hey, if there are any seventeenth century historians out there please tear my work to shreds if you can. Go on. Prove that I’m wrong. Shut me up forever. Make me go away. Make me crawl back under the non-academic stone from whence I came. But if you do try, you better be clear of your facts. Because any rebuttal will be closely scrutinised by the world at large – and who knows, your work may be labelled politically motivated and your reputation might be tarnished as a result. Because that’s exactly what has happened/will happen to the historians I mention in the book. Touché

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Q Has there been much discussion on your book in Ireland. If so could you describe it?

A Cromwell, An Honourable Enemy has been virtually dismissed by most historians here. At least the ones who have ventured into print. There are many who have not said anything and who knows what their private thoughts are. But none, and I mean none, have publically come out and supported me in any book that has been written since 1999. It’s virtually impossible for academics to accept the fact that an amateur has had the temerity to state that generations of experts have gotten such a controversial issue in Irish history wrong. Those who have ventured into print with rebuttals of my work are dealt with in the new book. I have proved that they have used disingenuous methods of interpretation to draw conclusions. And they should be totally ashamed of themselves for doing this, especially when this is such a hot political potato. But will they apologise and display any humility or contrition? Will they heck? I know this sounds like another Internet rant. And that’s what it is. But I’m nothing if not honest. And I’ve also waived all royalties for this new book. Why? Because I have been accused in the past of doing this for money. Get real people. This is about history. About righting a wrong.

Cromwell was Framed is probably well on the way to being dismissed by those same historians.  Ah, but here’s the rub. They are going to have to come up with primary source evidence that has not yet entered the public domain if they are to do challenge me in a meaningful way. And I mean primary source proof from the year 1649. Sure, I could be wrong. But until a serious challenge comes along that completely refutes my thesis, then I will continue to have the confidence to shout this from the highest rooftops. The historians are wrong. Cromwell did not commit war crimes in Ireland. Get over it. Have I a chip on my shoulder? You betcha. But hey, is it any wonder? It’s the constant refusal of scholars and experts to accept my work that irks. Call it a desire to be accepted if you will. So, yes, they’re to blame for my attitude. Not me. I see this as the little person versus the might of academia. And so far I’m winning

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Q What are your future plans?

A Now there’s a question. I got nothing. If anybody can think of a controversial topic for me to write about let me know. I’m on Facebook. I’d love to find out that St Patrick wasn’t all he was cracked up to be and do an exposé on him. Watch this space.

Two Revolutionary Crises

This is a paper delivered yesterday afternoon at the Early Modern Studies Conference at the University of Reading by Chris Thompson.  It has a new explanation of the origins of the English Civil War\Revolution. The paper is copyrighted Permission is needed to reproduce.

Exactly a century ago, A.P.Newton’s seminal book, The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans, was published. It traced the lineage of the Providence island Company with its unsuccessful attempts to found profitable Puritan settlements in the Bay of Honduras in the 1630s back to Elizabethan colonising and privateering efforts and forward to the expeditions of the Cromwellian Protectorate to the Caribbean in the 1650s. His investigation of the ties between the company’s adventurers and their activities in opposition to Charles I’s regime in the period of Personal Rule cast new scholarly light on this subject and had a profound influence on later historians.

Inevitably, however, the contours of historical analysis have changed. The events of the 1620s and 1640s are no longer viewed as causally linked. Accidents and contingency, the interplay of multiple kingdoms and rival conspiracy theories, the problems of political and religious myopia as well as those of personality now predominate. It has, indeed, never been more dangerous to enter the historical equivalent of a billiard hall.

Even so, it is impossible (for me, at least) to pass by such premises with their deep green baize tables, dim lights and interesting characters without being tempted in. I am conscious of the risk in doing so but life is too short not to do so at all. The argument that I shall put to you is basically that there were two profound crises in early Stuart England, a proto-revolutionary one in the late-1620s and a revolutionary one in the 1640s. I shall argue that these crises were umbilically linked and that there is unmistakable evidence not just of deep hostility to the Caroline regime after 1629 on the part of the king’s leading opponents but also of a growing willingness to resist him by force of arms from the mid-1630s. It was, therefore, in England, not in Ireland or Scotland, that the most serious of the early crises occurred and where discussions on alternative forms of government in Church and State first began.

The Crisis of 1629

The origins of the crisis of the 1620s can be traced to England’s engagement and failure in simultaneous wars against France and Spain; to the fiscal and military measures used to fight those wars; to the alleged infringement of the subject’s rights by the Crown in implementing those policies and the support for authoritarian rule from Arminian clerics in the Church whose doctrines and practices were anathema to Calvinists. Its symptoms were evident in resistance in varying degrees to levies of men, money and munitions; in the pressures placed on the machinery of local and national government to work in the face of this opposition; in arguments inside and outside Parliaments about the respective rights of the king and his subjects and in the development of ideas about conspiracies to subvert established forms of government in Church and State on the one hand and threats to undermine the sovereignty of the Crown on the other. There were little noticed revolts in the House of Lords in 1626 and 1628 against royal attempts to manipulate its membership, to intimidate opponents and to frustrate its dealings with the grievances of the House of Commons. Across the country, physical violence was common – in attacks, for example, on unpaid soldiers billeted on unwilling host communities, in protests from indigent sailors, and, most notably, in the murder of the royal favourite’s astrologer and of the Duke of Buckingham himself. These were quite apart from the remarkable tax strikes by merchants, especially in the Levant and East India companies, over duties involving an assault on the Customs House in London led by a former Lord Mayor and the brother of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Crown was effectively bankrupt by March, 1629 as Charles I’s critics well knew. If either of the groups then manoeuvring in the lower House had succeeded in their aims, the king would have been shorn of royal supremacy in religion and his capacity to choose his own servants severely limited. Within a few months, he characterised them as republicans aiming to reduce his power to nothing

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It is easy enough to find alarmist comments by contemporaries on the political situation in England after the dissolution of Parliament in March 1629. Domestic and foreign observers agreed on the divided state of the country. The king’s view was that the crisis was the result of the malice of a small group of M.P.s led by Sir John Eliot, a contention set out in a series of proclamations. The private correspondence of his advisers and servants, men like Viscount Dorchester, Heath and Roe, was on similar lines although Councillors were divided on whether Parliament could or should be summoned again. Regal and conciliar authority had to be restored, particularly by punishing the former M.P.s now imprisoned for sedition and, if Charles had his way, for treason. Attempts to do so in the courts nonetheless kept issues about Parliamentary privilege, the grounds for their imprisonment and terms for bail uncomfortably alive.

Critics of the regime shared such gloom. The unprecedented threat of violence on the floor of the House of Commons shocked Sir Thomas Barrington to the point where he told his mother that he blessed God there had been no more serious consequences. Dramatic accounts of the concluding events reached the godly further afield destroying hopes for defeating the twin menaces of Arminianism and Popery and for the further reformation of the Church. The Venetian Ambassador, Contarini, was in no doubt about the hostility to the king and his councillors and the prospect for future conflict in the spring of 1629, a view shared by a later report from a Spanish agent. Peace abroad, a resumption of trade and restoration of order offered the only hope.

There is some historiographical justification for regarding this as a proto-revolutionary situation. G.M.Trevelyan described the members leaving St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster in March 1629 as “freemen still and almost rebels” while Russell considered the aim of the demonstration planned for the 2nd as “the potentially revolutionary one of appealing over the King’s head to the country at large.” John Reeve and Austin Woolrych have both written about the wide-ranging, potentially revolutionary implications of the resolutions passed on that day for the idea of treason against the commonwealth. Hexter argued that relations between the royal Court and the more amorphous remainder of the body politic, the ‘Country’, broke down after 1618 and had reached ‘crisis level’ by the end of the next decade. They had ceased to speak the same language and the Commons had by then constructed a view of the Court as its palpable enemy. Puritan clergy and gentry were full of rage at the impotence of English policy abroad and the inroads made by Popery at home. He was thus the advocate of a theory of successive crises, one in the 1620s and a second one in the early-1640s leading to Civil War and Revolution. Stone agreed. It was the experiences of the late-1620s that led the future leaders of the Long Parliament, according to Trevor-Roper, to organise themselves in country houses, Puritan societies and trading companies for the revenge they were determined after 1640 to take. The concept of a link between the two crises of the late-1620s and the early-1640s thus has a respectable ancestry even if its genealogy has not hitherto been precisely traces.

The reaction of the leading critics of Caroline rule is difficult to detect given the absence of correspondence and diaries. But the strategy of Pym and Rich, the two men in the Commons most closely associated with the ‘great contrivers’ of the 1640s, had been predicated on inoculating the Church of England against Arminianism and crypto-Popery in return for settling the legality of collecting Tonnage and Poundage (and, perhaps, impositions). The breakdown of Parliament made that aim unrealisable. The anxiety of the great merchants in the East India and Levant companies over a continuing refusal to trade was sufficiently alarming for the 2nd Earl of Warwick, Viscount Say and Sele and the 2nd Lord Brooke, three of the principal figures in Newton’s embryonic connection, to appear at the Quarter Court of the East India company held on 2nd March to open a serious attack on the dominant London merchants. This suggests but does not prove that the idea of withholding revenues from the Crown to exact concessions was already present in their minds.

The Peers and their connections

The core of this group had been drawn together in the politics of the mid to late-1620s. They were committed to the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years’ War, to struggles against Arminianism and for the preservation of the House of Lords’ privileges and the rights of the subject. They were also connected to the Cambridge Puritan, John Preston. Warwick and Say and Sele, Pym and Rich are too well known to need much discussion here. The 4th Earl of Lincoln is probably best known as Say’s son-in-law and Preston’s pupil. The two men together with Francis, Lord Russell of Thornhaugh, the future 4th Earl of Bedford, supervised the settlement of the debts of Lincoln’s father. Lincoln was probably the author of the appeal to English freeholders in January 1627 to resist the Forced Loan as illegal and a threat to Parliament’s survival and to call them to follow his fellow peers in their resistance to the levy. His household and local allies were deeply involved in this campaign and many of them later became involved in the colonisation of Massachusetts.

Lincoln’s relationship with one of Preston’s other allies, the 2nd Earl of Warwick, is less well known. Warwick was not a Lincolnshire landowner himself but his step-mother, originally Frances Wray, was. There is evidence to connect their households and Lincoln’s in the late-1620s. Both men shared a taste for theological disputations before and at the York House conferences of February 1626 and were patrons of two of the first three ministers sent to New England in 1629. Both Earls proved to be supporters of Sir John Eliot after his incarceration in the Tower and drank the health of this arch-enemy of Charles I’s regime at every meal on a trip to the West country in 1631. Lincoln is, indeed, the most likely figure to have sought Warwick’s consent as President of the Council for New England to the granting of the New England and Massachusetts Bay Company charters in 1628 and 1629 respectively.

New England

The links between these men were already in place by the summer of 1628. The revival of plans to settle and trade in New England first developed by John White of Dorchester and his local allies was also under way in alliance with London merchants such as Matthew Cradock and John Venn, both of them friends of Eliot: in the next few months, a Lincolnshire contingent appeared, perhaps as a result of so many Forced Loan resisters having been sent to Dorset in 1627, many of them from the 4th Earl’s network of allies. The story of the transformation of the New England venture into the Massachusetts Bay Company in March 1629 with a new charter that allowed its place of government to be transferred there is one of the most familiar episodes in early colonial history. Warwick must have known about this.

The enterprise was more fundamentally transformed in the summer and autumn of that year. The idea of establishing a godly commonwealth there was canvassed with increasing enthusiasm in lay and clerical circles associated with the Earls of Warwick and Lincoln. A key meeting was held in Sempringham, probably in the Priory, which was Lincoln’s home, late in July and early in August 1629. Out of it came a series of observations from John Winthrop on the imminent doom awaiting England for its sinfulness: Antichrist had risen, the Church and universities had been corrupted, inflation was rampant and poverty multiplying: the only hope was to go to New England to found a new commonwealth and a new church. The remnant of the godly could follow the path of righteousness, multiply there and create a bulwark against Popery. It was a searing indictment of England under Charles I’s rule, a more comprehensive indictment than anything uttered by Alexander Gil in his cups or John Scott of Canterbury in his diary. It is possible to watch this argument being spread much further afield to sympathisers like Eliot and John Hampden before the Great Migration of 1630.

It is often said that the New England colonies in general and Massachusetts in particular owed nothing to aristocratic patronage. This is doubtful. Warwick – with whom John Winthrop the elder had long been connected – was of practical help in managing the rival claims of the Gorges family to the territory, in providing access to fortifications in Essex and in securing patents for new land. Winthrop himself was taken up by men in Lincoln’s circle in the autumn of 1629 and early winter of 1630|: when he sailed on the Arbella late in March 1630 he was accompanied by Lincoln’s brother, one of the Earl’s sisters and her husband, Lincoln’s putative former household steward and other allies of the peer. As the Barrington family’s correspondence shows, Warwick’s gentry allies and their clerical dependents were interested in the settlement and, like Warwick, prepared to help persecuted clergymen and others move there.

Saye and Sele’s interest in New England (with its distinctive form of congregational church government and a franchise dependent from the outset on church membership) was even more important. He, like Lincoln’s brother, was one of the recipients in March 1632 of the ‘Old Patent’ of Connecticut and, later that year, together with the 2nd Lord Brooke, bought the patent of Pascataqua. Its governor provided crucial evidence on behalf of Massachusetts before the Privy Council at the turn of the year against charges brought by Gorges and Mason alleging that the charter had been illegitimately obtained and that the colony was a nest of political and religious rebels. The colony’s most “noble and best friends” advised it to have a Council of allies in England to protect its interests. But a second hearing before the Council late in 1633 resulted in a demand for the return of the Massachusetts Bay Company’s charter. The colony’s enemy, Thomas Morton, gleefully reported how Cradock and Venn, its merchant allies, had been denounced by Archbishop Laud and, despite their great friends, had left the Council Chamber with lowered shoulders.

The reaction in Massachusetts was to procrastinate and to prepare to resist any expedition sent from England with force. In England, the colony’s supporters had already responded by dispatching a large quantity of arms. Simultaneously, propositions were sent “from some persons of great qualitye & estate (& of speciall note for pietye)” indicating their intentions to join with them if satisfied by Massachusetts’ rulers. Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke have traditionally been thought to be the authors of these proposals. This willingness to support forcible resistance to the Caroline regime, admittedly at a very great distance from England, is highly significant. It shows that, long before 1640 or 1642, such men had been alienated from the king’s rule to the extent that the use of violence against it was acceptable. More interestingly still, in the same summer, John Winthrop received a letter from Warwick offering his support and expressing his willingness to further the colony’s prosperity.

Fortunately, there is other material to illustrate the close relationship between these peers and the Bay colony’s rulers. The settlement of Connecticut was planned as a joint venture in 1634 and 1635 with the two noblemen and their radical allies, including Sir Arthur Hesilrige and Henry Lawrence, aiming to move there. The fort, moreover, to be erected at the mouth of the Connecticut River was explicitly intended as part of the coastal defences protecting their friends in Massachusetts from a sea-borne attack from England. In fact, Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke had distinct constitutional proposals in 1636 for a commonwealth covering both Connecticut and Massachusetts: they envisaged a ruling assembly divided into a house composed by gentlemen all of whose heirs would inherit places and a second composed of the elected representatives of the freemen for whom a property qualification was required: each house would have a negative voice and all officers would be responsible to the assembly. There was nothing in these proposals acknowledging royal authority at all: this would have been a minuscule Venetian republic without even a Doge. But, whatever the peers’ admitted personal qualities, severing the link between church membership and the rights of freemen in Massachusetts proved too much for the godly rulers of that colony to accept. They preferred their own arrangements and relations with the Saybrook adventurers deteriorated partly, at least, because migrants from the towns of Massachusetts seized the adventurers’ lands. Even so, when the members of the prospective ‘Junto’ were in treasonable contact with the Scottish Covenanters in 1639, it was to the refuge of Saybrook that they planned to flee if their plans to overthrow Charles I failed.

Conclusion

This colonial evidence casts important light on the evolution of the views of those identified by A.P.Newton as the core of the critics and opponents of Charles I’s regime in the 1630s. It can be supplemented by additional material from Bermuda and Providence Island, both potential refuges for the godly at that time. There was indeed, as Newton thought, a middle term, a connecting link between the major crises of the late-1620s and the early-1640s. Some of the fissile human material ejected by the first, proto-revolutionary detonation found its way to Massachusetts, which was the sanctuary for the defeated and explains, in part, some of its fossil-like features after 1640s. Revolutionary situations do not necessarily lead to revolution because accidents and errors intervene  but, in the case of Charles I’s realms, the delay merely increased the power of the ultimate explosion. Those who sought to exploit it remembered its origins very clearly and were determined not to lose their opportunity to re-cast the Church and State a second time.

                                                               

The Politics of the Tawney Archive: Class, Ideology, and the Fate of Historical Memory in Austerity Britain

The R. H. Tawney archive, now housed at the London School of Economics, is more than a collection of papers from one of Britain’s most influential twentieth‑century historians. It is a political object. Its existence, its content, and its institutional fate all speak to the conditions under which historical knowledge is produced, preserved, and contested in a society governed by capitalist imperatives. To evaluate the archive politically is to examine not only Tawney’s intellectual legacy but also Britain's broader political economy of culture: the austerity regime that has hollowed out public institutions, the ideological retreat within academic historiography, and the class struggle over the meaning of the English past.

This article offers such an evaluation. It argues that the Tawney archive is significant not because it offers the tactile pleasures of manuscript research, nor because it provides a sentimental link to a bygone era of British social history, but because it contains the documentary traces of a historian who, despite his ideological limitations, understood that capitalism’s moral vocabulary is a weapon of class rule. At the same time, the archive’s precarious institutional history, rescued from homelessness only through absorption by a wealthy university, reveals the degradation of public cultural infrastructure under neoliberalism. The archive is thus a site where two political struggles intersect: the struggle over the interpretation of the English Revolution, and the struggle over the survival of public historical memory.

Tawney’s Historical Project: Ideology as Social Function

Any political evaluation of the archive must begin with Tawney himself. Tawney was not a Marxist, and his ethical‑socialist commitments kept him firmly within the orbit of Labourism reformism. Christian socialism, Fabian gradualism, and a moral critique of inequality shaped his politics rather than a scientific analysis of capitalism’s laws of motion. Yet his historical instinct was unmistakably materialist. He understood that the rise of capitalism in early modern England required a moral and theological justification, and that this justification was consciously constructed to meet the needs of an emerging class order.

Religion and the Rise of Capitalism remains his most famous work, and for good reason. It is a partial, hesitant but significant attempt to show how religious doctrine was repurposed to legitimate the acquisitive ethic of early capitalism. Tawney saw that the transformation of economic life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was accompanied by a transformation in moral language: the virtues of thrift, industry, and profit‑seeking were elevated, while older communal and ecclesiastical restraints were reinterpreted or discarded. The archive contains the scaffolding of this argument: sermon notes, marginalia on theological treatises, and chapter drafts tracing the evolution of moral concepts.

What makes these materials politically significant is not merely their content but their orientation. Tawney was grappling with ideology not as abstract doctrine but as a social function. He understood, even if he did not fully theorise it, that the moral vocabulary of a class society exists to rationalise its material arrangements. In this sense, the archive preserves the intellectual labour of a historian circling a problem central to Marxist analysis: the relationship between ideas and class interests.

The Gentry Controversy: A Battle Over the English Revolution

The political significance of the archive becomes even clearer when placed in the context of the “Gentry Controversy,” the historiographical dispute between Tawney, Hugh Trevor‑Roper, and Lawrence Stone over the social origins of the English Revolution. Tawney’s argument that a rising gentry enriched by land, commerce, and office provided the social base for the revolutionary crisis of the 1640s  was an early attempt to articulate the bourgeois character of the Civil War. It suggested that the conflict was rooted in the transformation of property relations and the emergence of a class whose interests were incompatible with the absolutist state.

Trevor‑Roper’s rejoinder, that the gentry were in decline rather than ascent, was not a neutral academic correction. It was a political intervention. By denying the existence of a rising bourgeois stratum, Trevor‑Roper sought to undermine any interpretation of the Civil War as a bourgeois revolution. He mobilised his argument in its own time against precisely the kind of class‑based historical narrative Tawney’s work gestured toward. Stone’s later contributions complicated the picture but did not alter the fundamental stakes: the controversy was a proxy war over whether the English Revolution can be understood as a decisive moment in the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

The Tawney archive contains the raw material of this struggle. Essay drafts, notes on landholding patterns, and correspondence with contemporaries reveal a historian attempting to map the social forces that shaped the seventeenth century. To engage the archive politically is to recognise that these documents are not relics of antiquarian interest but evidence of a historiographical battle over the class character of the English past. The archive is a site where the ideological struggle over the meaning of the English Revolution is materially present.

The Archive as Political Object: Austerity, Precarity, and Institutional Capture

Yet the political evaluation cannot stop at Tawney’s ideas. The archive’s institutional fate is itself a commentary on the condition of public culture under British capitalism. The Women’s Library, which houses the collection, was “saved from homelessness” only through absorption by the LSE. This phrase, often repeated in accounts of the archive’s relocation, should be taken literally. The library, a public cultural institution with a unique historical mission, became precarious under decades of austerity, its survival dependent on rescue by a wealthy university.

This is not a story about digitisation or the supposed “loss” of tactile research. It is a story about the systematic underfunding of public cultural infrastructure. Budget cuts have gutted archives, libraries, and museums across Britain, forcing them to reduce staff, limit access, and, in many cases, close entirely. The Women’s Library’s absorption into the LSE is emblematic of a broader trend: public institutions rendered insecure, dependent on elite universities or private donors for survival, their autonomy compromised by the logic of austerity.

The Tawney archive is therefore a political object not only because of what it contains but because of the conditions under which it exists. Its precariousness reflects the broader degradation of public memory under neoliberalism. The archive’s survival depends on institutional capture, and its accessibility is shaped by the priorities of a university increasingly oriented toward market imperatives.

Digitisation and the Politics of Access

The sentimental lament that digitisation threatens archives is a distraction. Digitisation, properly funded, would democratise access to Tawney’s papers far beyond the narrow circle of researchers who can visit Bloomsbury. It would allow workers, students, and independent scholars to engage with materials that are currently accessible only to those with institutional affiliation and geographic proximity.

The real threat is not technology but political economy. Digitisation requires investment, infrastructure, and long-term planning, all of which austerity undermines. The fear of digitisation often expressed by archivists and academics is, in reality, a displaced anxiety about the collapse of public funding. The problem is not that archives will become “surplus to research requirements,” but that they will become inaccessible, under‑resourced, and increasingly subordinated to elite institutions' priorities. A materialist account of archival access begins with this recognition. The struggle is not between paper and pixels but between public culture and austerity.

Conclusion: The Archive as Site of Class Struggle

To evaluate the Tawney archive politically is to see it as a site where multiple struggles converge. It preserves the intellectual labour of a historian who, despite his ideological limits, understood that capitalism’s moral vocabulary is a weapon of class rule. It contains the documentary traces of a historiographical battle over the class character of the English Revolution. And its institutional precariousness reflects the degradation of public cultural infrastructure under neoliberalism.

The archive is thus a microcosm of Britain's broader crisis of historical memory. It reveals how austerity erodes the foundations of public culture, how elite institutions capture and contain historical resources, and how the ideological retreat within academic historiography mirrors the political retreat of the Labourist tradition Tawney himself inhabited.

 

  

A history that stops short of its own logic: Selina Todd's The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910–2010

Selina Todd's book arrives at a time when declaring the decline of the working class has become a common theme in academic and political discussions. From André Gorz's 1980 Farewell to the Working Class to John Major's concept of a "classless society" and Tony Blair's statement that "we are all middle class now,' decades of debate have focused on the idea that the working class is disappearing, at least in a political sense. Todd's title, with its narrative of rise and fall, positions her within this ongoing conversation, regardless of her personal views.

This thesis has faced many challenges over the years. Since its 2014 release, and especially during the social upheavals caused by COVID-19, strikes, large-scale protests, and a resurgence of socialist ideas have emerged. These developments challenge any story of inevitable working-class decline. In fact, the pandemic vividly revealed who sustains modern economies and whose labour is vital for society.

History from below, without the historical materialism

Todd works self-consciously in the tradition of "history from below," and the resemblance to E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class is not accidental. She describes the period she covers as a "working-class century," beginning when the vast majority of Britons still worked with their hands. The implicit claim of her title—that this class has since fallen—does not survive close examination of her own material. The working class of the early twenty-first century is not the same as in 1910. Still, its position in relation to capital is unchanged in its essentials, and repeated economic crises have, if anything, driven layers of the middle class back into it rather than out of it.

Todd's own account of her motivations is that existing labour history concentrated on organised, unionised workers and left out the domestic servants, casual labourers and unemployed among whom she grew up. This is a harder claim to sustain than she perhaps intends, given how much social history of exactly this kind has been produced over the past thirty years. Whatever the merits of that claim, the resulting book is a serious piece of work. It is well researched, readable, and strongest where it draws on oral testimony: Todd combed local studies libraries and the social surveys of the 1950s and 60s to assemble the voices of more than two hundred people, and the resulting text is genuinely rich—servants, militant trade unionists of the 1960s and 70s, the first generation of council-house buyers under Thatcher, lives transformed and destroyed by fortune, unemployment and war.

The book runs into difficulty in its underlying conception of class. Like Thompson, whose influence on her is explicit, Todd treats a historical-materialist account of class as inadequate on its own, preferring to speak of class, in her words, "in a less determined way." This follows directly from Thompson's own definition of class in his essay on "The Peculiarities of the English": not a fixed position in the relations of production but a "happening," a shared body of experience and tradition that a group of people come to recognise and act upon.

The political origins of this method are not incidental. Thompson left the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1956 and, with John Saville, founded The New Reasoner; it later merged with Stuart Hall's Universities and Left Review to form the early New Left Review. Both Thompson and Saville were sharply hostile to the Trotskyist current represented at the time by the Socialist Labour League. What was presented as a "socialist humanist" recovery of an authentically English Marxism functioned, in substance, as a means of carrying forward the Communist Party's Stalinist "British Road to Socialism" in a new theoretical idiom—one that substituted nation, culture and, later, gender and ethnicity for a materialist analysis of class. The consequences of that substitution for Marxist historiography have been considerable, and Todd's own treatment of class bears their imprint.

This is not simply an academic dispute. It shapes what Todd does and does not do with her material. She does not sentimentalise the working class, and to her credit she is clear that most of it has historically sought to reform capitalism rather than overthrow it. But her treatment of the trade union bureaucracy and the Labour Party is correspondingly soft, coming at points close to passing over their record rather than confronting it directly. The point made by the Trotskyist writer Cliff Slaughter, in a 1960 polemic on revolutionary leadership, remains relevant here: working-class consciousness of its own historical role does not arise spontaneously but has to be fought for, against the educational and political institutions through which the ruling class reproduces its own outlook within the class it exploits—and that struggle cannot be won without a high degree of centralised political organisation.

What is missing

It is telling that a book of more than 450 pages on the twentieth-century English working class does not mention Karl Marx and refers to the Communist Party only twice. More significant still is what the book omits from its account of the century's defining events. Todd treats the Second World War and the rise of Thatcherism as the pivotal moments for English workers, but the single event that did most to shape the modern labour movement—in Britain as everywhere else—took place not in Britain but in Russia: the October Revolution of 1917—a history of the twentieth-century working class that leaves out 1917 leaves out its own centre of gravity.

Equally striking, given her acknowledged debt to Thompson, is Todd's silence on the Communist Party Historians Group of the 1940s and 50s, of which Thompson himself was part, alongside Rodney Hilton, Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill. One need not endorse the group's politics to recognise that writing a serious history of the modern English working class is difficult without reference to their work. As the Marxist writer Ann Talbot observed in her 2003 assessment of Christopher Hill, this generation of historians represented a specific and critical juncture—the passing of British world hegemony to the United States and the sharpening of class conflict—in which socialist-minded intellectuals looked to the Soviet Union and to 1917 for a model of an alternative society, even as their work carried the marks of Stalinist politics. Talbot's critique of the "People's History" genre this milieu helped establish, associated above all with A.L. Morton, applies with some force to Todd's own approach. By absorbing rebels and revolutionaries of every period into a single national-popular tradition, that genre tended to blur their actual class character, in the service of a Popular Front politics that subordinated the independent interests of the working class to alliances with supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie.

Conclusion

The People is a genuinely useful record of working-class experience across the twentieth century, carried by real skill in oral history and narrative construction. It is not, and does not present itself as, a Marxist analysis of class. What it lacks—a materialist account of class as a structural relationship to the means of production rather than a shifting cultural identity, and any serious engagement with 1917 or with the historians who took that event as their starting point—is not a peripheral omission but the book's central weakness. A future study by Todd prepared to take both questions seriously would be a genuine contribution.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary text

Todd, Selina. The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910–2010. London: John Murray, 2014.

Interviews

Gill, Joe. "British historian Selina Todd interviewed." Dear Kitty. Some Blog, 3 May 2014. http://dearkitty1.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/british-historian-selina-todd-interviewed/

Theoretical and historiographical sources

Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963.

Thompson, E.P. "The Peculiarities of the English." The Socialist Register 2 (1965): 311–362. Marxists' Internet Archive.

Slaughter, Cliff. "What is Revolutionary Leadership?" Labour Review 5, no. 3 (October–November 1960): 93–96, 105–111. Republished by the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).

Talbot, Ann. "'These the times... this the man': an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill." World Socialist Web Site, 25 March 2003. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html

Works referenced for context

Gorz, André. Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism. Translated by Michael Sonenscher. London: Pluto Press, 1982. Originally published as Adieux au prolétariat (1980).

Morton, A.L. A People's History of England. London: Victor Gollancz, 1938.

Note on sourcing: Quotations from Thompson, Slaughter and Talbot above are drawn from the citations as they appear in the original draft under review and have been kept brief and paraphrased where necessary in line with standard citation practice; readers wishing to consult full statements should refer to the primary sources listed.

 

 

Thomas Harrison, the Fifth Monarchists, and the Unresolved Questions of the English Revolution

Thomas Harrison’s death at Charing Cross in October 1660 has long overshadowed the political journey that brought him there. Pepys’s famous remark that Harrison died “as cheerful as any man could do in that condition” has become a shorthand for remembering the regicide, capturing a vivid moment from Restoration theatre that has overshadowed the deeper historical issues his career raises. David Farr’s Major-General Thomas Harrison is only the third full biography of Harrison and the first to utilise the full range of available archival material.

Based on rigorous research, it is a serious and long-overdue work. However, it also stops short of drawing the conclusions that its own evidence suggests. Harrison’s life cannot be fully understood without examining the class struggles of the English Revolution, the complex role of millenarian republicanism, and the structural limitations of plebeian radicalism within a bourgeois revolution. Farr gathers the raw materials for such an analysis but does not provide the synthesis.

Harrison and the Problem of English Historiography

Harrison's neglect is deliberate. English historiography has historically been uncomfortable with the 1640–1660 revolution, especially the radical armed republicans and millenarians. Britain’s citizenship test today skips the Civil War period because its scars are still considered too fresh. The revolution is viewed as an anomaly, a disruptive break in the presumed steady flow of constitutional monarchy.

Farr’s achievement is revisiting manuscript sources to piece together Harrison’s early years in Newcastle-under-Lyme and London, his advancement in the New Model Army, and his crucial involvement in the revolutionary crisis. He structures the biography thematically, addressing providentialism, millenarianism, army culture, reputation, and political alliances, which is effective since Harrison’s public record is more complete than his private life. Nevertheless, this thematic approach also allows Farr to sidestep the key question: what social forces cultivated Harrison’s radicalism, and why did those forces ultimately fail to drive the revolution to its outcome?

Farr’s book highlights the most compelling parts of Charles I's trial and execution, as well as Harrison's treatment during the Restoration. Harrison, second only to Cromwell and Ireton in political influence among the fifty-nine who signed the death warrant, was a prime target for royalist revenge after the monarchy was restored. His notable presence made him, along with the king, one of the most urgent targets for retribution. Farr observes that Harrison’s calmness at his execution served as “a different kind of public text: a demonstration of unbroken faith rather than of crushed rebellion,” illustrating that the Restoration government aimed to show that revolutionary actions would be harshly punished. At the same time, radical supporters saw his death as proof that their cause endured.

However, Farr’s analysis falters where the stakes are highest. His frequent use of terms like “textual representation” and “textual responses” implicitly adopts the theoretical framework of cultural studies, an approach created specifically to shift focus away from class as the key element of historical analysis. “A man was hanged, drawn and quartered… describing the aftermath mainly as a matter of competing ‘texts’ risks losing sight of the true issues in the streets and Parliament.”

This is a significant methodological issue, not just a small debate. Harrison's execution was not merely a semiotic event; it was a forceful reassertion of property, hierarchy, and monarchical authority following a decade in which these structures had been severely challenged. Framing it as a simple discursive contest overlooks the underlying material struggle.

The Fifth Monarchists: Class, Millenarianism, and the Limits of Plebeian Radicalism

Farr’s analysis of the Fifth Monarchists expands on Bernard Capp’s fundamental research, which identified the movement’s supporters mainly among urban artisans and the lower middle class, such as "weavers, tailors, cobblers, small tradesmen.” A royally hostile pamphlet mocked that even a list of “gentlemen” in their group would be so short it could fit on half a penny’s worth of paper once the weavers, tailors, brewers, cobblers, tinkers, and mat-makers were removed.

This movement drew on petty bourgeois and artisan classes destabilised by war, enclosure, and trade disruptions. For these groups, the revolution meant both potential ruin and opportunity. Their millenarian beliefs were not just religious eccentricities but a political reaction to social upheaval. However, Farr misses a key conclusion: the Fifth Monarchists were a plebeian faction within a bourgeois revolution, and their agenda mirrored the structural constraints of that role.

They did not oppose private property itself; instead, they aimed for a fairer redistribution within a system of small-scale ownership. Their interest in Mosaic law mirrored the conflicting tendencies of a class seeking moral clarity amid economic instability. Unlike the Levellers, they showed less concern with expanding voting rights. Instead, they were more focused on spreading the revolution internationally. John Rogers’s criticism that the army was inactive domestically while efforts were needed abroad highlights this missionary drive.

The Fifth Monarchists supplied both the fighting force and moral conviction for the revolution, yet they lacked the social influence to settle the key property issue. This was ultimately resolved by Cromwell, Ireton, and the army leaders, individuals from a wealthier and more conservative social background.

Harrison was, in Farr’s words, “at Cromwell’s shoulder,” indicating close alignment. Cromwell supported Harrison’s millenarian views when convenient but withdrew support when they risked the settlement he prioritised. The Barebones Parliament of 1653, Harrison’s main hope, was England’s closest step to a theocracy. Its quick downfall signalled the radical faction’s surrender to more conservative forces, well before the Restoration sealed that dominance.

Christopher Hill is the most significant historian to have studied the radical fringes of the revolution. However, even in his work The World Turned Upside Down, he offers little insight into the Fifth Monarchists, despite their movement attracting the support of tens of thousands. Hill’s later view, seeing Paradise Lost as reflecting on the revolution’s failure, illustrates a common challenge among leftist historians: understanding why the plebeian faction was defeated, rather than simply noting that it was.

The answer rests on the nature of bourgeois revolution itself. The English Revolution was not a proletarian insurrection; instead, it represented the political strengthening of a burgeoning bourgeois order. Plebeian and artisan groups could serve as a force against feudal monarchy, but they could not impose their own agenda on the rising capitalist class. Their millenarian republican ideals could not become the dominant ideology in a society whose economic base was shifting toward agrarian capitalism, trade expansion, and empire-building. Farr’s archival research provides the foundational data for this interpretation, although he does not attempt to theorise it.

Social Origins and the New Model Army

The final part of the book, which details Harrison’s transition from the edges of merchant and lawyer communities into the New Model Army’s officer ranks, clearly highlights Farr’s socioeconomic argument. Using Ian Gentles’s prosopographical research, Farr demonstrates that a significant minority of New Model officers advanced from lower ranks- a level of social mobility not seen in Royalist armies.

This fluidity reflected the “antinomianism” and “Puritan egalitarianism” that defined the radical wing of the army. Harrison exemplifies this pattern. His millenarian beliefs didn't come out of nowhere; they stemmed from his social position, caught between petty bourgeois insecurity and revolutionary possibilities.

Once more, Farr fails to analyse how this internal radicalism connected to the larger class forces vying for control of the revolution. The New Model Army was not a uniform entity; instead, it was a battleground dominated by conflicting class interests. Harrison embodied the plebeian and artisan classes, while Cromwell represented the conservative bourgeois middle class. Harrison's defeat thus signified the conservative bourgeoisie's victory over the plebeian and artisan factions.

Harrison’s execution was more than revenge; it symbolically reinforced the social order the revolution had challenged. Pepys’s comment that Harrison died “as cheerful as any man could do in that condition” reflected the belief that a man could fail politically yet remain faithful. The Restoration government needed to set an example, and his death warned others against thinking the revolution could be undone. However, his calm acceptance of death ensured his memory would continue to inspire those who saw the revolution not as a mere mistake in governance but as an ongoing struggle.

What Farr Achieves and What Remains to Be Done

Farr's work showcases meticulous historical research by thoroughly bringing to light a previously overlooked yet vital figure. His book is poised to become the authoritative source on Harrison for many years. It confronts a historiographical trend that often portrayed Harrison as a naive fanatic, primarily remembered for four words about the king and his own death.

The book's main flaw is its framework rather than its research. A genuine materialist analysis of Harrison and his movement needs to explain why an artisan-led millenarian republicanism could inspire the fighting spirit and moral purpose of a revolution that ultimately did not achieve its goals. It should also clarify why, by 1660, the Fifth Monarchists’ vision of a godly commonwealth was replaced by a restored monarchy supported by the propertied classes who the revolution had initially opposed. Farr provides nearly all the necessary evidence for this interpretation, but others must develop the final insights.

 

Revisionism by Another Name: The English Revolution c.1590–1720

The Return of a Revolution Without Its Content

Nicholas Tyacke’s edited collection, The English Revolution c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities, promises to restore the English Revolution to its rightful place in historical debate. For decades, the dominant academic tendency, revisionism, has denied the very existence of a revolution, reducing the mid‑seventeenth century to a crisis of governance, administrative strain, and political miscalculation. Tyacke’s volume appears to challenge that orthodoxy. It revives the vocabulary of revolution, adopts the long chronological frame associated with Marxist historiography, and gestures toward the structural transformations that shaped the period. Yet the gesture is largely rhetorical. The book resurrects the language of revolution while quietly discarding the analytical framework that once gave that language explanatory force.

The English Revolution was not a constitutional accident. It was the political expression of profound social change: the erosion of feudal relations, the rise of capitalist agriculture, the expansion of overseas commerce, and the emergence of new social groups whose interests collided with the Stuart monarchy's absolutist ambitions. Any serious attempt to explain the revolution must confront these processes. Tyacke’s contributors do not. The result is a collection that borrows the temporal architecture of Marxist historiography while rejecting the materialist analysis that made that architecture meaningful.

Tyacke’s introduction is the volume's most substantial attempt to reclaim the term “revolution.” He summarises the Whig and Marxist traditions with clarity and fairness, and he acknowledges the limitations of revisionism. But he does not confront the intellectual consequences of revisionism’s dominance. The likely reason is simple: most contributors remain too close to the revisionist worldview to mount a serious challenge. The book thus occupies an ambiguous position: post‑revisionist in rhetoric, revisionist in substance.

The Long Seventeenth Century Without Its Engine

The chronological sweep from 1590 to 1720  places the volume within the tradition of the “long seventeenth century,” a concept forged by Marxist historians. Eric Hobsbawm’s general crisis thesis argued that the seventeenth century marked a decisive stage in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Hugh Trevor‑Roper’s counter‑argument, though hostile to Marxism, accepted the need for structural explanation. Christopher Hill’s Century of Revolution treated the English Revolution as the pivot of the entire period.

Tyacke’s contributors adopt the temporal frame but abandon the structural analysis. The result is a long seventeenth century drained of its meaning: a chronology without causality. The revolution becomes a prolonged episode of ideological quarrelling and constitutional improvisation, rather than the political expression of deep social transformation.

This is not merely an intellectual shortcoming. It reflects a broader trend in early modern historiography: a retreat from economic history, a suspicion of class analysis, and an elevation of micro‑politics and localism. The discipline has become increasingly capable of describing the revolution in exquisite detail while increasingly unable to explain it.

Revisionism and Its Post‑Revisionist Shadow

Revisionism, associated with Conrad Russell, Kevin Sharpe and John Morrill, insisted that the civil war was an accident: the product of short‑term misjudgements, provincial grievances, and the administrative difficulties of ruling three kingdoms. It denied any connection to long‑term economic or social change. Tyacke acknowledges this, but he does not confront the consequences. The contributors’ focus on high politics, religion, print culture, and elite manoeuvres remains comfortably within the revisionist comfort zone. The book’s post‑revisionist stance is therefore limited. It restores ideology to the centre of the period, but ideology without class becomes abstraction. It recognises conflict, but conflict without material roots becomes theatre. It speaks of revolution, but revolution without social forces becomes metaphor.

High Politics Without Social Foundations

The strongest chapters address the revolutionary decades. Even here, however, the focus remains overwhelmingly on elite politics, religious conflict, and print culture. Sean Kelsey’s chapter on Eikon Basilike is meticulously researched and revealing. It shows that royalism was not a monolithic bloc but a coalition divided by social tensions. This is precisely the kind of research that could challenge revisionist assumptions, yet the book never draws out its implications. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes helped restore ideology to the centre of early Stuart studies.

Michael Braddick’s effort to connect 1640 with 1688 is genuinely valuable. But ideology without class becomes abstraction. The “long revolution” Braddick describes lacks the social interests that made 1688 a settlement favouring property, Parliament, and the rising bourgeoisie. John Walter’s chapter stands out. His work on popular politics, riots, and crowd action continues the “history from below” tradition of Hill, Thompson and Manning. But even Walter stops short of treating the lower orders as decisive actors. Manning demonstrated that they were not merely a backdrop but a driving force shaping events in London, the counties, and within the New Model Army itself.⁹ Walter’s reluctance to follow Manning’s lead reflects the volume’s broader limitations.

What the Book Cannot Explain

The most glaring omission is economics. Across 212 pages, the book offers no sustained discussion of enclosure, the rise of capitalist agriculture, the expansion of the cloth trade, colonial commerce, the emergence of a powerful merchant bourgeoisie, or the transformation of London into a capitalist metropolis.

These were not peripheral developments. They were the material processes that produced the social groups whose interests collided with the Stuart monarchy's absolutist ambitions. Without them, the English Revolution becomes inexplicable: a constitutional quarrel that somehow ended in regicide, a republic, and military dictatorship.

The avoidance of economic history is not accidental. It reflects a broader trend in revisionist and post‑revisionist scholarship: a retreat from structural analysis toward micro‑politics, localism, and ideological nuance. The result is a discipline that can describe the revolution in exquisite detail while increasingly unable to explain it.

Conclusion: A Useful Collection, But Not a Sufficient One

Tyacke’s volume is well written, well researched, and often illuminating. It will be useful to students and general readers. But it is not a serious attempt to restore the English Revolution as a category of historical explanation. It revives the vocabulary of revolution while quietly discarding the Marxist analysis that made the term meaningful.

Anyone who wants to understand why England had a revolution in the seventeenth century rather than simply how it unfolded will still need to return to Hill, Manning, and Hobsbawm. Tyacke’s collection supplements that tradition, not replaces it.

Bibliography

Braddick, Michael, ‘The English Revolution and its Legacies’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 189–212.

Cust, Richard, and Ann Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England (London: Longman, 1989).

Hill, Christopher, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (London: Nelson, 1961).

Hobsbawm, Eric, ‘The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century’, Past and Present, 5 (1954), pp. 33–53; 6 (1954), pp. 44–65.

Kelsey, Sean, ‘The King’s Book: Eikon Basilike and the English Revolution of 1649’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 63–84.

Manning, Brian, The English People and the English Revolution (London: Heinemann, 1976).

Morrill, John, ‘The Causes and Course of the English Civil War’, in John Morrill (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 279–307.

Russell, Conrad, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

Sharpe, Kevin, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

Trevor‑Roper, Hugh, ‘The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’, Past and Present, 16 (1959), pp. 31–64.

Tyacke, Nicholas (ed.), The English Revolution c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

Walter, John, ‘Politicising the Popular? The “Tradition of Riot” and Popular Political Culture in the English Revolution’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 113–140.

 

A Field in England: Revolution Without the Revolutionaries

Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013) has been widely praised for its visual invention, its genre‑bending strangeness, and its audacity in staging a Civil War hallucination on a shoestring budget. But beneath the surface of its black‑and‑white psychedelia lies a telling expression of the ideological exhaustion that has gripped British cultural life for decades. The film’s aesthetic ingenuity cannot conceal its profound historical emptiness. It is a work about the English Revolution in which the revolution—and the revolutionaries—have been almost entirely erased.

This erasure is not accidental. It reflects a broader intellectual retreat from the understanding of the 1640s as a decisive moment in world history, a revolution in which masses of ordinary people intervened consciously in political life, debated the foundations of power, and articulated demands for equality and democratic control that resonate to this day. Wheatley’s film, for all its technical flair, embodies the opposite outlook: a Hobbesian nightmare of isolated individuals, driven by fear, appetite, and superstition, stumbling blindly through a landscape stripped of meaning.

Hobbes Without History

The film opens with an epigraph from Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes’s famous description of life in a state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes wrote those words in 1651, as the English Revolution was reaching its climax. They expressed his fear of what humanity might become without a strong sovereign power. Wheatley, however, treats Hobbes not as a theorist of political order but as a chronicler of the age itself. The film’s world is one in which social bonds have collapsed, ideas have evaporated, and human beings exist as little more than instinctual creatures. This is not the 1640s. It projects contemporary pessimism onto the past.

The plot is deliberately slight. A handful of men flee a battle—of which we see almost nothing—and wander into a field where the rest of the film unfolds. Among them is Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), a timid alchemist’s assistant sent to apprehend O’Neil (Michael Smiley), a rogue who has stolen from his master. O’Neil soon dominates the group, forcing them to dig for treasure he claims lies beneath the soil. A meal of hallucinogenic mushrooms plunges the film into a series of disorienting sequences, culminating in a struggle between Whitehead and the diabolical O’Neil.

The film’s technical qualities are genuine. Shot in stark monochrome, it has moments of striking visual beauty. Wheatley borrows freely from Eisenstein’s montage, Weimar expressionism, and the folk horror tradition of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Flashes of dark humour and bursts of violence are genuinely unsettling. But these elements serve a narrative that is almost aggressively empty of historical content.

The Revolution That Isn’t There

Serious films about the English Civil War are rare, and Wheatley’s project attracted attention from historians and critics alike. The period remains one of the most consequential in British history: a king was tried and executed; a standing army debated the foundations of political authority; radical movements such as the Levellers and Diggers articulated demands for democracy and common ownership that would not be heard again for centuries. None of this appears in A Field in England.

Historian Annette Bullen, writing for the Institute of Historical Research, noted that religion—central to every aspect of 17th‑century life—barely registers in the film. Only one character expresses religious feeling, and others mock or ignore his prayers. Cromwell and the King are mentioned only in passing. The men have no political consciousness, no sense of the world-transforming events around them. They would rather be in an alehouse than at the Putney Debates. They fight, when they fight at all, for causes they neither understand nor care about. This is not a neutral artistic choice. It reflects a long ideological shift.

From Winstanley to Wheatley: A Cultural Retreat

The contrast with Winstanley (1975), Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s masterpiece about Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger commune, is instructive. Brownlow and Mollo approached the period with seriousness and respect, reconstructing the Diggers' world with painstaking accuracy. Their film is about ideas—ideas fought for by ordinary men and women who believed the earth should be a “common treasury” for all. Its soldiers belong to an army that debated ordinary people's rights at Putney. Wheatley’s characters, by contrast, have no ideas.

Bullen argues that each film reflects its time's intellectual climate. Winstanley emerged from the late 1960s, when Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill interpreted the Civil War as a genuine revolution—a clash of social classes that cleared the way for capitalist development. By the mid‑1970s, revisionist historians were gaining ground, recasting the conflict as an accident, a muddle of local grievances and aristocratic factionalism with no deeper social logic.

A Field in England is the cultural expression of where that retreat has led. Its world is not merely post‑Marxist; it is post‑historical. The revolution has vanished entirely. In its place are isolated individuals, drugged and brutalised, in a field that could be anywhere. Whatever Wheatley’s intentions, the film echoes the outlook that has dominated academic life and the arts for decades: history has no meaning, grand narratives are suspect, and human beings are driven by appetite and fear.

The Political Meaning of Erasure

The 1640s were a moment when masses of ordinary people—soldiers, artisans, small farmers—intervened directly in politics. They debated questions of power, property, and equality with a seriousness that puts today’s political establishment to shame. To reduce that period to a Hobbesian nightmare is to erase precisely what made it significant.

At a time of deepening social inequality, growing hostility to the political elite, and widespread disillusionment with parliamentary politics, the revolutionary tradition of the 1640s has renewed relevance. It shows that ordinary people can think for themselves, organise collectively, and challenge entrenched power. Wheatley’s film, however, offers only despair. It mistakes hallucination for history and substitutes nihilism for political imagination.

Conclusion

A Field in England is beautifully photographed, occasionally funny, and crude and violent in equal measure. As a work of folk horror, it is striking. But as a work about the English Revolution, it is a wasted opportunity. It reflects and reinforces an ideological climate in which collective agency has been forgotten, radical ideas dismissed, and history itself reduced to a series of disconnected, meaningless episodes.

 

E.P. Thompson, the New Left, and the Politics of Historical Evasion: A Marxist Reassessment

The fiftieth anniversary of The Making of the English Working Class has triggered many commemorations, most earnest and uncritical, that avoid direct confrontation with the political implications of E.P. Thompson’s historical approach. Scott Hamilton’s The Crisis of Theory fits into this pattern. It is a thorough, often sympathetic, sometimes insightful book, but ultimately avoids addressing key issues. Its main argument that Thompson’s separation from the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1956 marked a “crisis of theory” from which he never fully recovered functions more as a storytelling device than a rigorous historical analysis, dramatising a rupture that Hamilton does not deeply explore.

The issue isn't that Hamilton misreads Thompson, but that he declines to engage with the political tradition that shaped him. Thompson didn't come from a Marxist movement nor break away from one. He was formed in the Stalinist environment of the CPGB in the 1940s, a Stalinism that had already lost its revolutionary essence, become nationalist, and aligned with the Popular Front’s strategy of subordinating the working class to “progressive" bourgeois sectors. Mentioning a “crisis of theory” in 1956 suggests Thompson had a revolutionary theory beforehand, which isn't true. Hamilton’s book, by neglecting this crucial context, unintentionally reveals the limitations of its preferred historiographical tradition.

The Politics Hamilton Cannot Confront

Hamilton’s early chapters stand out as some of his best, yet even they show signs of evasion. He details Thompson’s political apprenticeship in the CPGB thoughtfully, but he downplays its significance, showing leniency towards the brothers’ patriotic enthusiasm. Frank Thompson’s wartime complaint that it was “humiliating” to sit by while other nationalities fought for Britain conflicts with any notion of genuine internationalism.

This detail matters: it reflects the CPGB's political climate in the 1940s, where nationalism disguised as Marxism, Popular Frontism appeared as internationalism, and Stalinism claimed to represent revolutionary continuity. Thompson emerged from the war as a staunch Stalinist, and his subsequent record shows no indication that he confronted the Moscow Trials or the purge of the Bolshevik Old Guard.

Hamilton’s silence regarding the Trotsky–Stalin conflict is intentional, not accidental. It reflects a fundamental structural choice. Addressing this conflict would mean challenging the core ideas of Stalinism: the rejection of perpetual revolution, the promotion of “socialism in one country,” and the shift of Marxism from a scientific theory of global revolution to a nationalist, gradualist ideology. Thompson embraced this framework completely, influencing his political views, his approach to history, and his opposition to theory. Hamilton cannot openly recognise this without undermining his entire argument.

The Communist Party Historians’ Group: The Missing Foundation

The most noticeable omission in Hamilton’s book is the absence of the Communist Party Historians’ Group and, most importantly, Dona Torr. It is difficult to credit an account of Thompson’s formation that omits the person most responsible for it. Torr was not merely a mentor. She was the architect of the CPHG’s national‑radical historiography, the intellectual bridge between Popular Front politics and “history from below.” Her biography of Tom Mann, situating him as “a late representative in a story of England’s long-running struggle,” is the template for The Making of the English Working Class. The working class appears not as a class defined by its objective position in capitalist production, but as the bearer of an instinctively radical national tradition. This is not Marxism. It is Popular Frontism translated into historiography.

Thompson’s later rejection of the CPHG’s approach as “quaintly empirical" was more of a stylistic critique than a fundamental disagreement. The core assumptions, such as nationalism, empiricism, scepticism of theory, and opposition to internationalism, remained consistent in his work. Hamilton’s lack of comment on Torr is therefore deliberate. Addressing her would mean challenging the entire Popular Front.

1956 and the New Left: A Break Without a Rupture

Hamilton’s most compelling chapters explore Thompson’s exit from the CPGB and the establishment of The New Reasoner. However, even here, the key question remains unasked: was Thompson’s departure a move toward revolutionary Marxism, or just a change within a non-revolutionary political context? At the Wortley Hall Conference in April 1957, John Saville stated that the goal was to develop a body of Marxist ideas relevant to the British working class, which involved examining “our own working-class movement and its history.” David North’s response is particularly impactful: The real problem was not insufficient knowledge of Manchester or Liverpool in the 1820s, “but what had happened inside the Russian Communist Party in the 1920s.”

Thompson and Saville shifted their focus from the international class struggle to the national radical tradition. However, this was not a departure from Stalinism but a continuation of it. Thompson’s antagonism toward Trotskyism further supports this, as he told The Newsletter that Trotskyist views “tend toward the petrification and perpetuation of sectarian division.” Slaughter remembered Thompson describing Trotskyism as “sectarian, ultra-left and anti-revolutionary," indicating that he was still embedded within Stalinist ideas rather than emerging from them.

Hamilton’s interpretation of the Thompson–Anderson dispute is proficient yet lacks depth. Your review observes that neither party framed their arguments within an internationalist Marxist perspective. The entire debate centred on nationalist ideas. Anderson’s claim of an ‘epochal bourgeois revolution’ spanning from the twelfth to the nineteenth century was a Ptolemaic construct, a theoretical framework designed to uphold English exceptionalism. While Thompson’s counterargument, backed by stronger archival research, also remained confined to national boundaries, neither addressed the crucial question: how the English Revolution integrates into the global development of capitalism and international class struggles. The conflict did not reflect lively theory; rather, it reflected fatigue within theoretical approaches.

The Making of the English Working Class: Achievement and Limit

The Making remains a significant work, yet its focus on subjective experience comes at the expense of downplaying the objective, international, and scientific aspects of Marxism. This tension is at the core of Thompson’s approach. While his effort to preserve the stories of “the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver” from “the enormous condescension of posterity” is compelling, it results in portraying the working class as a moral subject rather than a revolutionary force. Their radicalism appears instinctive rather than rooted in theory, their history remains national instead of international, and their struggle is cultural rather than political. This is not Marxism. It is radical liberalism with a working‑class accent.

Hamilton’s The Crisis of Theory is an important yet ultimately vague book, often enlightening but evasive in key areas. By excluding the Historians’ Group, Dona Torr, and the Socialist Labour League’s critique, it omits the crucial material needed to evaluate what Thompson’s 1956 “crisis” actually addressed or left unresolved. The reality, which is simpler and more uncomfortable, is that Thompson did not face a theoretical crisis because he never truly had a revolutionary theory to start with. His split from the CPGB was organisational rather than ideological. His politics stayed nationalist, empiricist, and opposed to the internationalist Marxism he knew only through Stalinist distortions. This essay aims to contribute to the view of Thompson not as a tragic figure who lost a theory, but as a symbol of a political tradition that never actually held one.

 

 

A Short Interview with Historian John Morrill on the New Critical Edition of Oliver Cromwell’s Writings and Speeches

For over two years, John Morrill and a team of eight researchers have been engaged in one of the most ambitious editorial projects in modern Cromwell studies: A New Critical Edition of all the Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. Their work promises to reshape the textual foundations on which Cromwell scholarship has rested for more than a century. In this short Q&A, Morrill outlines the scope, challenges, and implications of the project.

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

Morrill: 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 many 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 emerges from your research?

Morrill: There is nothing transformative. But by excluding a few items we think are apocryphal, improving the texts of some important letters, and understanding the context better, we think there will be many small things that will cumulatively 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?

Morrill: 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. Most of the speeches he made to Parliament also appear in multiple copies from different scribes. Stabilising those texts has been rewarding but difficult.

Do the commentaries and headnotes represent a move away from previous historiography on Cromwell?

Morrill: 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), 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.

Are the volumes aimed primarily at an academic audience, or will they be accessible to a wider readership?

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

What is the expected publication date?

Morrill: 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 publication by the end of 2015.