Royalist Clergy and the English Revolution: A Review of Fiona McCall’s Baal’s Priests

Fiona McCall’s Baal’s Priests is a remarkable example of archival research. It is the first comprehensive study to systematically utilise the extensive John Walker manuscripts housed in the Bodleian Library—an extraordinary collection that scholars have largely overlooked for hundreds of years. McCall’s thorough reconstruction of the lives of clergy sequestered, imprisoned, or displaced during the 1640s and 1650s is commendable. The book exemplifies careful, detailed scholarship and brings to light a wealth of historically neglected evidence, correcting misconceptions about the social effects of the civil wars.

The subtitle suggests a broader scope than the book actually covers. Although it references the “English Revolution,” McCall discusses it only briefly. Her primary focus is the loyalist clergy, their hardships, and how they remembered these experiences. It largely neglects the underlying political and social upheavals that led to these hardships. Whether McCall deliberately chose this framing or the publisher influenced it, it makes the book feel somewhat awkward, especially as it avoids the key debates dominating current historiography. Overall, the book offers detailed insights into its specific subject but leaves the broader revolutionary context underexplored.

This absence matters because the Walker manuscripts do more than document clerical hardship; they also reveal 1640s social relations and how civil war changed them. The clergy were not just neutral spiritual figures caught in conflict. They were allies of the monarchy and the old order—collecting tithes, enforcing obedience, and representing a hierarchical church closely linked to the crown. Hostility toward them didn't emerge randomly; it reflected deeper societal conflicts during a revolutionary crisis. Viewing their suffering solely as a religious issue, disconnected from the political struggle behind it, overlooks the significance of the evidence McCall has carefully gathered.

The book’s lack of engagement with politics is notable, especially considering its detailed material. McCall demonstrates that numerous clergy opposed Parliamentarian authority, at times violently. She provides evidence of armed clashes, sabotage, and collaboration with royalist groups. These incidents are significant, showing the clergy as active players in a conflict that reshaped the English state. However, McCall stops short of exploring the full implications. The Walker manuscripts do more than record persecution; they document the clash between two social orders—one ascending and the other in decline.

This review aims to clarify the historiographical debate. McCall’s approach aligns more with the revisionist perspective associated with John Morrill than with Christopher Hill's Marxist tradition. Revisionists aim to downplay the revolutionary aspects of the civil wars, framing them as a “war of religion” or local disputes. In contrast, Hill and others see the king's overthrow, the abolition of the Lords and bishops, and the rise of radical groups like the Levellers and Diggers as signs of a deep social revolution. By avoiding this debate, McCall's study seems detached from the political context that gives the Walker manuscripts their significance.

Marx’s insight in The Eighteenth Brumaire is highly relevant: during revolutionary crises, people summon past ideas and debate using borrowed language. English revolutionaries used scripture, while their adversaries relied on the language of divine-right monarchy. Taking this language literally, as revisionists often do, confuses the superficial appearance with the deeper significance. The persecution of loyalist clergy was not just a religious issue but a crucial element in the fight over the organisation of state and society. McCall’s book is therefore best understood as an excellent introduction to its subject rather than a full account of the English Revolution. It opens the door to a richer, more politically grounded reading of the Walker manuscripts—one that remains to be written.

The Walker Archive

The Walker collection began life as a polemical counterblast. Edmund Calamy’s 1702 account of the nonconformist ministers ejected after the Restoration provoked John Walker, an Exeter clergyman, to compile a rival catalogue of Anglican clergy persecuted by Parliament and the Cromwellian regime. Walker spent roughly a decade assembling his Sufferings of the Clergy (1714), drawing on printed sources, legal documents, parish papers, and—crucially—more than a thousand replies to a circular he distributed through archdeacons. The sheer scale of the response speaks to how intensely the clergy and their families remembered the upheavals of the 1640s. It also reveals how the Restoration Church sought to construct a counter-narrative to the Puritan martyr tradition Calamy revived.

The resulting archive is not oral history in the strict sense, but much of it was written decades after the events, often by descendants or successors. It is steeped in family memory, parish tradition, and partisan purpose. The letters Walker received were shaped by the early eighteenth-century political climate, when the Church of England fought to assert its authority against dissenters and defend its role in the state. Those who wrote to Walker had every incentive to dramatise their accounts, to emphasise suffering, and to present the clergy as victims of illegitimate persecution. The archive is therefore a hybrid creation: part memory, part polemic, part historical record. Walker himself was cautious enough to include contradictory material, but the collection cannot be treated as a verbatim transcript of the 1640s.

McCall is fully aware of these problems. She faces the same methodological challenge Walker did: separating subjective recollection from objective fact. Her judgment that the manuscripts constitute a broadly reliable body of evidence is defensible, but the book could have done more to equip general readers to navigate the archive’s complexities. The Walker manuscripts demand a high level of critical engagement. They require the historian to read not only for what is said but for why it is said, and for the silences, exaggerations, and distortions that inevitably accompany retrospective testimony. McCall acknowledges these issues but tends to treat the manuscripts as transparent windows onto clerical experience rather than as contested artefacts shaped by memory and ideology.

This is a missed opportunity, because the Walker archive is itself a product of political struggle. It was assembled to defend the Church of England’s reputation and to counter the narrative of Puritan suffering that had become central to dissenting identity. In this sense, the archive is part of the English Revolution's long afterlife. It reflects how the civil wars continued to be fought in memory, in print, and through competing claims by religious communities. A more politically attuned reading would have explored how the clergy and their families framed their experiences, interpreted the actions of Parliamentarian committees, and sought to position themselves within the moral economy of Restoration England.

The temporal distance between the events and their recording also raises important questions about the nature of historical memory. Children or grandchildren wrote many of the accounts Walker collected of the clergy involved. Their narratives blend inherited stories, local tradition, and early eighteenth-century political assumptions. They are shaped by a desire to honour ancestors, defend the Church, and present the civil wars as a period of illegitimate disorder. McCall notes these tendencies but does not fully explore their implications. The Walker manuscripts are not simply sources; they are interpretations of the past, shaped by present needs.

This is where the book’s reluctance to engage with the politics of the English Revolution becomes most apparent. The clergy who suffered sequestration, imprisonment, or displacement did so because they belonged to an institution deeply embedded in the old social order. They were not neutral spiritual figures but agents of royal authority, tithe collectors, and defenders of hierarchical structures. Their persecution was not merely the product of religious zeal or local vendettas. It was part of a broader struggle over the nature of the state, the distribution of power, and the legitimacy of monarchy. To treat their suffering as a purely confessional phenomenon is to detach it from the revolutionary context that gave it meaning.

McCall’s methodological caution is admirable, but it leads her to underplay the political significance of the Walker archive. The manuscripts do not simply record clerical hardship; they record the collision between two social orders. They reveal how the clergy experienced the breakdown of royal authority, responded to the rise of Parliamentarian power, and interpreted the actions of soldiers, committees, and local activists. They also reveal the class tensions that shaped parish life, as tithe‑payers, tenants, and labourers confronted clergy who represented the old regime.

A more politically grounded reading would have shown how the Walker manuscripts illuminate the social dynamics of the English Revolution. They are evidence not only of suffering but of resistance, conflict, and the reconfiguration of authority. They show how the clergy understood their place in a remade world, and how they sought to preserve that understanding despite defeat.McCall’s book remains a valuable contribution. But the Walker archive demands a historian willing to confront the political and social forces that shaped both the events of the 1640s and their remembrance. That task remains open.

Suffering—and Resistance

The book’s strongest sections vividly reconstruct the treatment of loyalist clergy under Parliament and the Protectorate: ejection, imprisonment, confiscation of goods, and the impoverishment of families. McCall convincingly demonstrates that the campaign was sanctioned at the highest levels. Parliament often merely ratified actions taken by committees and local agents.

Crucially, McCall resists portraying the clergy as passive victims. As James Mawdesley noted in his Reviews in History critique, many fought back. Jonathan Swift later boasted that his grandfather Thomas Swift, vicar of Goodrich, had laid a trap in a river that killed some 200 enemy soldiers (p. 107). McCall calculates that at least 150 Walker accounts record acts of aggression by the “sufferer” (p. 201).

These glimpses of clerical resistance point toward something the book touches on but never develops: the class relations embedded in the conflict. The clergy were not neutral spiritual figures. They were pillars of the monarchy and the old social order—collectors of tithes, enforcers of obedience, and agents of royal policy. Hostility toward them did not arise spontaneously. It reflected the deeper antagonisms of a society in revolutionary crisis.

McCall’s reluctance to engage with politics means these dynamics remain underexplored. Her chronology even omits Charles I's execution in January 1649, and the book never clearly marks the beginning of government without a monarchy. For a study titled the English Revolution, this is a striking omission.

Memory and Its Limits

McCall’s central interest is memory: how suffering was recorded, shaped, and transmitted. She documents real trauma. But suffering was not confined to loyalists. Parliamentarian soldiers, sectaries, and ordinary civilians endured devastation on a comparable scale. A more balanced treatment would have situated clerical experiences within the broader landscape of suffering in the civil war.

There is also a historical irony McCall herself highlights. The Restoration did not bring the vindication many loyalist clergy expected. Under Charles II, survivors often fared little better than they had under Cromwell. The restored monarchy prioritised stabilising its rule, not compensating those who had suffered in its name. The loyalist clergy discovered that political loyalty did not guarantee political reward.

A Question of Historiography

McCall’s historiographical stance is difficult to pin down. She respects Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill. Still, her approach aligns more closely with John Morrill’s revisionist interpretation of the conflict as a “war of religion” rather than a revolution. She examines religious and confessional loyalty in great detail while largely avoiding the question of which social forces were contending for power.

This omission is not neutral. For decades, revisionists have sought to strip the 1640s of their revolutionary content, recasting the upheaval as a series of accidents, provincial quarrels, or confessional disputes—a “war without an enemy,” in Sir William Waller’s phrase. Against this, Hill and others insisted that the overthrow and execution of a king, the abolition of the Lords and bishops, and the emergence of radical movements such as the Levellers and Diggers constituted a profound social revolution.

Marx’s observation in The Eighteenth Brumaire is directly relevant: in revolutionary crises, men “conjure up the spirits of the past” and fight in borrowed language. The English revolutionaries spoke in scripture; their opponents in the idiom of divine-right monarchy. Taking this language at face value, as revisionism does, mistakes costume for drama. The persecution of the loyalist clergy was not a confessional sideshow. It was part of the struggle over the structure of state and society. Read critically, the Walker manuscripts show that struggle.

Conclusion

Readers seeking a challenge to the revisionist minimisation of the English Civil War’s social character will not find it in Baal’s Priests. McCall has produced an important, carefully researched study, but one that stops short of drawing the political conclusions her material points toward. The book is best read as an excellent introduction to the Walker archive, not as a definitive account of royalism or the English Revolution.

If McCall returns to this material, one hopes she will be prepared to confront the political and social dynamics that shaped the experiences she so ably documents.

 

Radicalism Without Revolution: Revisionism and the Assault on the English Revolution

More than half a century after Christopher Hill's pioneering studies restored the Levellers, Diggers and Ranters to the historical stage, the struggle over the meaning of the English Revolution remains unresolved. Indeed, it has intensified. Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context, a collection of essays arising from a 2006 conference held at Goldsmiths, University of London, reflects the continuing efforts of a generation of historians to redefine, fragment and ultimately neutralise the revolutionary content of the most profound social upheaval in seventeenth-century England.

The volume edited by Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan contains valuable archival research and several worthwhile contributions. Yet taken as a whole, it exemplifies a broader tendency in contemporary historiography: replacing social conflict, class interests, and revolutionary transformation with a language of discourse, contingency, and context. The editors ask whether the term "radical" can legitimately apply to movements and ideas associated with the English Revolution. Behind this seemingly semantic dispute lies a more fundamental question: whether the English Revolution can still be understood as a revolution.

The editors begin by surveying three major historiographical approaches to radicalism. The first, identified with Conal Condren and Jonathan Clark, is the nominalist position. Since neither "radical" nor "radicalism" possessed their modern political meanings in the seventeenth century, these historians object to their retrospective application. The implication is that historians should employ only categories available to contemporaries themselves.

This position is untenable. Historical analysis necessarily employs concepts unavailable to historical actors. If historians were prohibited from using categories developed after the events they describe, concepts such as feudalism, capitalism, absolutism and even the Renaissance would disappear from historical scholarship. The nominalist approach reduces history to antiquarianism, replacing explanation with the mere cataloguing of language.

The second approach, traditionally dominant before revisionism's rise, treated radicalism as a substantive phenomenon. Although divided between liberal and Marxist interpretations, both schools regarded the English Revolution as a decisive turning point in social and political development. Whether understood as the foundation of constitutional liberty or as a bourgeois revolution driven by class conflict, radical movements mattered historically because they emerged from broader processes of social transformation.

The third approach, now dominant and broadly endorsed by the editors, is the functional definition associated with J.C. Davis, Jonathan Scott and Glenn Burgess. Here radicalism is defined not by specific social content but by its relationship to contemporary norms. Any idea or movement challenging established assumptions may be considered radical. Radicalism thus becomes entirely relative to context.

At first glance, this position appears more flexible and sophisticated than either traditional liberal or Marxist interpretations. In practice, however, it evacuates radicalism of all historical substance. The Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists, Ranters and republicans become isolated phenomena linked only by their deviation from prevailing conventions. The social forces that produced them disappear from view.

This framework shapes much of the volume. Several essays offer important empirical insights. Mario Caricchio's study of the publisher Giles Calvert reconstructs the network of radical religious writers clustered around his Black Spread Eagle bookshop in London. Nicholas McDowell explores the literary and theological influences that shape religious radicalism, while Noam Flinker examines the Ranter Abiezer Coppe's use of Midrashic methods. Jason Peacey's contribution investigates royalist pamphleteering during the civil wars and shows that defenders of established authority could appropriate apparently radical language.

Yet throughout the collection the relationship between ideas and social interests remains curiously absent. Peacey's observation that royalist propagandists employed radical rhetoric does not demonstrate that the revolution lacked social foundations. It demonstrates only that counterrevolutionary forces sometimes sought to exploit popular grievances for their own purposes. The distinction is significant.

Some of the strongest chapters point toward conclusions more profound than those permitted by the editors' theoretical framework. Stefano Villani shows that contemporary Italian observers often interpreted English events as a conflict between social orders rather than merely a constitutional dispute. Jim Smyth's study of republican imperialism traces the ideological assumptions underpinning Cromwell's conquest of Ireland, revealing the relationship between republican government and colonial expansion. These chapters suggest that contemporaries themselves often perceived dimensions of social conflict that many modern historians are reluctant to acknowledge.

The collection becomes more problematic when viewed within the wider historiographical campaign against Christopher Hill and the Marxist interpretation of the English Revolution. Hessayon's own essay on Gerrard Winstanley is not objectionable in itself. His emphasis on Winstanley's religious development usefully reminds readers that the Digger leader emerged from a world saturated with theological assumptions. Serious historians have never denied this fact. Certainly Christopher Hill did not.

But Hessayon has repeatedly advanced a broader critique of Hill, accusing him of selective use of evidence and of projecting modern concerns backwards into the seventeenth century. Such criticisms form part of a wider revisionist assault associated with J.C. Davis's Fear, Myth and History and Alastair MacLachlan's The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England. These works challenge not merely particular interpretations of radical movements but the legitimacy of conceiving the English Revolution as a revolutionary process at all.

The tendency reaches beyond purely scholarly concerns. Hessayon's review of Edward Vallance's A Radical History of Britain was notable less for its assessment of the book than for its warnings about providing "ammunition" to contemporary extremists. Vallance correctly responded that the review seemed more preoccupied with present-day politics than with his work's contents. Such episodes are revealing. The issue is not simply whether Hill occasionally overstated connections between historical movements. The deeper objection concerns whether past popular struggles might retain political relevance today.

Nevertheless, Marxists cannot respond by uncritically defending every aspect of Hill's legacy. The Communist Party Historians' Group's achievements were immense. Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, A.L. Morton, E.P. Thompson and others transformed British historical scholarship by recovering the experiences of ordinary people and insisting upon the centrality of social conflict. Their work represented a major advance over conservative political history.

Yet the political conditions under which it emerged shaped this historiography. The Communist Party of Great Britain's embrace of the Popular Front following the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935 encouraged the search for a specifically national democratic tradition. As historians such as Philip Bounds have noted, British Communists increasingly emphasised an indigenous line of radical development stretching from the Peasants' Revolt through the Levellers and Chartists to modern labour movements.

This framework produced important historical discoveries. At the same time it encouraged a nationalist conception of historical development in which class conflict was often subsumed within a broader narrative of "the English people" advancing democratic traditions across the centuries.

This approach's weaknesses became apparent as political conditions changed. Because the radical tradition was often presented as a transhistorical national inheritance rather than a product of specific social relations, the political spectrum could appropriate it. Appeals to the Levellers and Chartists have since appeared not only among socialists but among populists and nationalists of various political persuasions.

A genuinely Marxist approach proceeds differently. Marx and Engels regarded the English Revolution as the first great bourgeois revolution in European history. It represented neither the awakening of an eternal democratic tradition nor merely a collection of competing religious discourses. It was a struggle rooted in profound transformations of property relations and state power.

The Levellers and Diggers were not embryonic socialists. Nor were they dissenting voices within a discursive field. They represented the aspirations of social layers whose demands exceeded what the emerging bourgeois order could accommodate. Their defeat stemmed not from defective rhetoric or from a failure to construct convincing ideological narratives. It resulted from the revolution's objective limitations and the balance of class forces that emerged in its aftermath.

Leon Trotsky grasped this essential point in Where Is Britain Going? Writing in 1925, he insisted that Cromwell's revolution belonged to the working class's political inheritance because it demonstrated the necessity of revolutionary methods to break the resistance of an obsolete ruling order. For Trotsky, the English Revolution's historical significance lay not in a continuous radical tradition but in the dynamics of revolutionary struggle.

From this standpoint, the deficiencies of Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context become clear. The collection allows radicals to exist only after detaching them from the social forces and historical processes that produced them. They become localised expressions of difference, stripped of broader historical significance.

There is much valuable scholarship in these essays. Readers will learn a great deal from the contributions of Smyth, Villani, Caricchio, and several others. Yet the volume ultimately remains confined within the assumptions that have dominated English Revolution studies since the rise of revisionism in the 1970s and 1980s.

The English Revolution was not merely a clash of languages or competing discourses. It was a social revolution whose consequences shaped the development of capitalism, empire and the modern state. Any serious assessment of seventeenth-century radicalism must begin from that fundamental reality.

Revisionism has enriched our knowledge of detail. It has not provided a viable alternative understanding of the revolution itself. A renewal of historical materialist scholarship, freed from both revisionist scepticism and the nationalist distortions inherited from Popular Front historiography, remains an urgent intellectual task.

Selected Bibliography

Bounds, Philip. Orwell and Marxism: The Political and Cultural Thinking of George Orwell. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009.

Davis, J.C. Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Temple Smith, 1972.

Hill, Christopher (ed.). The Law of Freedom and Other Writings of Gerrard Winstanley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

Hessayon, Ariel and David Finnegan (eds.). Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

MacLachlan, Alastair. The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England: An Essay on the Fabrication of Seventeenth-Century History. London: Macmillan, 1996.

Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction (1843-44).

Trotsky, Leon. Where Is Britain Going? London: New Park Publications, 1975 [1925].

Vallance, Edward. A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries, the Men and Women Who Fought for Our Freedom. London: Little, Brown, 2009.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins. The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States. London: Verso, 1991.

Wood, Neal. The Social History of Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

 

 

The regicides and the English Revolution: Charles Spencer’s Killers of the King and the unresolved legacy of 1649

On January 30, 1649, his subjects brought a king before judgment and executed him in public. The beheading of Charles I was not simply the dramatic climax of the English Civil War. It was one of the great revolutionary acts in world history. For the first time, a reigning monarch was tried by representatives of the people, convicted as a tyrant and traitor, and put to death in the name of a higher authority than the crown. The execution proclaimed that sovereignty no longer resided in the king by divine right, but could be claimed by society itself.

More than three and a half centuries later, the events of 1649 remain politically explosive. The regicide poses questions that successive generations of historians have sought either to explain or evade. How did a movement that began by fighting for Parliament's rights against royal absolutism end by abolishing the monarchy altogether? Why did ordinary soldiers, artisans, merchants and farmers conclude that peace was impossible while the king lived? And why, after overturning the old order, did the revolution ultimately prove unable to secure its gains?

Charles Spencer's Killers of the King addresses only part of this historical problem. It is an engaging account of the men who signed Charles I's death warrant and the vengeance they later faced at the Restoration. Spencer writes with considerable narrative skill and has done a genuine service by bringing the regicides' history to a broad audience. Yet his book exemplifies the limits of contemporary popular history. It tells us much about individuals' courage and fate, but little about the social forces that turned political conflict into revolution.

The relative neglect of the regicides by modern historians is itself significant. C. V. Wedgwood's A King Condemned remains the indispensable account of the king's trial. Since its publication, only a handful of major studies have seriously addressed the subject. This neglect reflects broader developments within academic historiography.

For much of the post-war period, historians such as Christopher Hill understood the English Civil War as a bourgeois revolution rooted in profound economic and social transformations. The emerging capitalist classes sought to break the political constraints imposed by feudal absolutism and establish forms of government compatible with the developing market economy. Political and religious struggles reflected deeper conflicts embedded in society's structure.

Over the last several decades, however, revisionist historians have sustainedly attacked this interpretation. Revisionist historians have replaced the concept of revolution with narratives of contingency, misunderstanding, and elite political manoeuvre. Social class has largely disappeared from view. The Civil War is presented less as a revolutionary upheaval than as a tragic misunderstanding among a political elite that stumbled into conflict.

The implications for understanding the regicide are obvious. If the Civil War was essentially accidental, then Charles I's execution appears inexplicable. If no underlying social transformation was underway, then the destruction of the monarchy becomes little more than a collective act of political madness.

Spencer's work does not explicitly embrace revisionism, but it remains influenced by its assumptions. The central question confronting any account of the regicide is straightforward. Why did men who initially fought under the slogan of "King and Parliament" come to conclude that the king himself had to die?

The answer lies not primarily in personal characteristics or individual motives. Charles I was stubborn, duplicitous and politically inept. Yet European history contains many incompetent rulers who were not brought before revolutionary tribunals. The explanation lies not in the king's personality but in the social crisis that engulfed seventeenth-century England.

As Blair Worden has observed, revolutionary wars transform those who fight them. The New Model Army, established to defeat the king militarily, increasingly developed political conclusions that extended beyond Parliament's original objectives. Prolonged struggle radicalised thousands of soldiers. They confronted not merely the king's armies but an entire structure of political authority rooted in hereditary privilege.

The decisive turning point was the Second Civil War in 1648. Charles I's secret negotiations and encouragement of renewed armed resistance convinced many who had previously favoured compromise that no stable settlement was possible while he remained alive. The king had become identified with perpetual counter-revolution.

Spencer acknowledges this development but never adequately explains it. His preferred method is biographical rather than social. He approaches history primarily through personalities and individual experiences. This produces vivid storytelling but limits historical understanding.

Karl Marx's observation in The German Ideology remains essential. Human beings make history under specific social conditions, and consciousness develops through lived experience rather than abstract reflection. The regicides lacked a modern revolutionary programme. They understood their actions through religious language, constitutional arguments and historical analogy. Yet the social content of their actions extended far beyond their own conscious intentions.

The rank and file of the New Model Army increasingly represented layers of society whose interests conflicted sharply with the old order. Smallholders, artisans, merchants and sections of the lower yeomanry had acquired both military confidence and political expectations. They had fought, sacrificed and bled for victory. Many were unwilling to accept a settlement that restored the authority they had spent years defeating.

The famous encounter between Colonel George Joyce and Charles I captures this shift with remarkable clarity. When the king demanded to see Joyce's commission authorising his actions, Joyce pointed to the soldiers behind him. Their collective force was his commission. Authority no longer flowed downward from the monarchy. It was being recreated from below through revolutionary struggle.

This was the profound significance of 1649. As Christopher Hill and other Marxist historians argued, Charles's execution represented far more than the punishment of a failed monarch. It signalled a decisive rupture with feudal conceptions of power. Whatever compromises followed, no English ruler could ever again govern exactly as Charles had attempted. The revolution permanently altered the relationship between ruler and ruled.

The greatest strength of Spencer's book lies not in its discussion of the regicide itself but in its account of what followed.

The Restoration unleashed one of the most determined political manhunts in British history. The surviving regicides became fugitives. Some escaped abroad. Others were captured and subjected to spectacularly brutal public executions intended to terrify republican sentiment into submission.

Spencer vividly recreates this campaign of revenge. What emerges most clearly is the social background of the men being hunted. Many were not members of ancient aristocratic families. They were sons of tradespeople, craftsmen, and minor property holders who had risen through talent, conviction, and military service. Their careers reflected the social mobility revolution itself unleashed.

The pursuit of the regicides also exposed the extraordinary opportunism of many Restoration figures. Sir George Downing, once a servant of the Commonwealth and later a diplomat for Charles II, personally organised the capture of former comrades. Spencer's account shows how quickly principles dissolved as the political climate changed.

Yet here the book's limitations become most evident. Spencer largely presents the Restoration as an understandable act of royal revenge. Charles II wanted to punish those responsible for his father's death. Former parliamentarians sought to divert attention from their own past actions. Such explanations are not false. They are simply inadequate.

The Restoration was not merely a personal triumph for a returning monarch. It was a political settlement accepted by broad sections of the ruling class. By 1660 the propertied elite had secured many of the changes they desired from the revolutionary period. The old absolutist project had been defeated. The power of Parliament had expanded. Property relations had been consolidated in ways favourable to emerging capitalist interests.

At the same time, these same social layers feared the democratic impulses that the revolution had unleashed. Levellers, radical republicans, and militant sections of the army raised demands that threatened not merely the monarchy but property itself. The ruling classes increasingly feared popular radicalism more than they feared kings.

The punishment of the regicides therefore served a broader political purpose. It symbolically buried the revolutionary aspirations that had extended beyond the interests of the propertied elite. The revolution retained its constitutional achievements. Its most radical possibilities were repudiated.

This contradiction explains the fate of the English Revolution more effectively than appeals to individual betrayal. George Monck's opportunism mattered. But political turncoats succeed only when broader social conditions permit it. The republic's collapse after Cromwell's death reflected deep weaknesses within the revolutionary regime, including its inability to build a durable alliance with the popular classes whose mobilisation made the revolution possible.

Historians such as James Holstun have examined these contradictions far more seriously than Spencer. Questions of class, property and political power remain largely absent from Killers of the King. Consequently, the book describes the end of the revolutionary process without fully explaining either its origins or its defeat.

Spencer's own conclusions are ironic. The ninth Earl Spencer began the project expecting to sympathise with Charles I. Instead, he ended with considerable admiration for the men who condemned him. He accepts that the king's execution was necessary and endorses the view that the trial helped secure constitutional gains that shaped Britain's future development.

This is ultimately a modernised Whig interpretation of the Revolution. Spencer recognises the progress embodied in 1649, but he understands that progress primarily in constitutional terms. Parliamentary government, the rule of law and limits on executive power emerge as the revolution's chief achievements.

What disappears from view is the deeper social transformation that made such constitutional changes possible. The English Revolution was not merely a dispute about legal arrangements. It reflected the emergence of new social forces and property relations that increasingly clashed with the old feudal order.

For that reason, Killers of the King remains an important but limited work. It is not a serious analysis of the English Revolution. It lacks a coherent social interpretation and never fully transcends the horizons of political biography. Nevertheless, it is exceptionally readable, meticulously researched and often compelling. Above all, it rescues from historical obscurity a group of men who carried out one of the most audacious acts in political history.

The regicides understood the historical forces they represented only imperfectly. Yet through their actions they demonstrated a truth that has echoed through every subsequent revolution: kings rule only for as long as society permits them to rule. Once that belief is destroyed, no throne is secure. The men who signed Charles I's death warrant discovered this truth in its most dramatic form. The ruling classes that returned to power in 1660 never forgot it. Neither should historians today.

 

One response To Killers of the King by Charles Spencer

There’s always plenty of scope for revisiting historical events – even ones we think we understand. And as always there are messages for our own times: “They had their own reasons for vengeance. 

For a lot of Parliamentarians, choosing the king’s killers as scapegoats took the attention away from their own years of rebellion against the Crown”. Yes indeed!

A Scott' s blog can be found http://turkeyfile.wordpress.com/

The Making—and Unmaking—of a Marxist Historian: Revisiting E. P. Thompson

Published to mark the fiftieth anniversary of *The Making of the English Working Class*, *E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism* serves both as a tribute and an intervention. Edited by Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor and published by Manchester University Press in 2013, this volume fits within a thriving field of Thompson scholarship. This field has expanded steadily since his death and shows no signs of slowing down. Events at Harvard, Birkbeck symposia, new publications from Monthly Review Press, and ongoing biographical and historiographical analyses all highlight Thompson’s lasting significance. His work remains widely translated, debated, and included in curricula worldwide. Few British historians post-WWII have attracted such sustained international attention. However, this widespread recognition has created a peculiar distortion: Thompson is celebrated, contextualised, and memorialised, yet rarely subjected to a rigorous Marxist critique. This noticeable gap is what the current review aims to address.

The editors present their collection as a multifaceted assessment of Thompson—covering his roles as a historian, educator, poet, peace advocate, and political figure. Many contributors, personally acquainted with Thompson or engaged within his intellectual circle, approach him with a blend of respect and critique. The eye-catching cover, clearly inspired by Soviet interwar propaganda posters, aims to place Thompson within a history of radical politics. However, this choice is ironically complex, given Thompson’s complicated and often hostile relationship with Marxism, especially its revolutionary Soviet form. His political evolution—from early Communist Party membership to Cold War dissent and New Left activism—was characterised more by breaks than consistency. Consequently, the cover’s stylistic homage unintentionally underscores the gap between Thompson’s idealised radicalism and the Marxist tradition he aimed to support.

Mainstream academic audiences have received the volume well. Sheila Rowbotham commends its sympathetic yet critical tone, highlighting the editors’ success in showcasing Thompson’s broad intellectual scope. Mary Kaldor considers it a reminder of the “loss of English radicalism” and a prompt to revive it. These endorsements show how the book aligns with a broader academic trend that views Thompson as a symbol of humane socialism, participatory democracy, and cultural dissent. He is celebrated not only for The Making but also for his critiques of nuclear weapons, his defence of civil liberties, and his focus on the moral aspects of politics. In this way, Thompson has become a symbol of a certain kind of left-liberal nostalgia—an icon invoked to mourn the decline of grassroots activism and the weakening of public intellectual engagement.

Despite the growing body of literature, one perspective is notably missing: a Marxist critique of Thompson’s politics and approach to history. This gap is deliberate. The widespread hostility to authentic Marxism—especially the classical Marxism of Trotsky, Lenin, and the revolutionary tradition—has led to Thompson’s anti-Marxist critiques being seldom questioned. Instead, people often praise them as bold acts of intellectual independence. His criticism of Althusser, his dismissiveness of “theory,” and his focus on moral experience over class analysis are viewed as refreshing counterpoints to dogmatism. However, for Marxists dedicated to historical materialism, these positions are not a progression but a step back from Marxism.

This review does not aim to cover every chapter of the volume or every facet of Thompson’s extensive work. Instead, it highlights aspects most relevant to his political ideas—his views on class, his opposition to Marxist theory, his moral critique of Stalinism, and his influence on the British New Left. These themes are crucial to understanding Thompson’s legacy and his ongoing role in modern historiography. Often seen as the symbol of “history from below,” emphasising agency, culture, and lived experience, this positive view can hide the political consequences of his approach: replacing class struggle with moral storytelling, favouring cultural radicalism over revolutionary action, and turning Marxism into an ethical outlook rather than a scientific analysis.

By emphasising Thompson’s activism—his advocacy for peace, opposition to nuclear armament, and critique of Cold War militarism—the editors strengthen a moralised perspective. Although Thompson’s activism was genuine and often brave, it also reflected a strong rejection of Marxist ideology. His 1956 split from the Communist Party, triggered by Khrushchev’s disclosures and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, shifted his focus from revolutionary Marxism to humanist moralism, increasingly excluding class analysis. The New Left he co-founded embodied this moral stance: anti-authoritarian, culturally broad, and politically varied. It criticised capitalism without proposing a revolutionary agenda and praised working-class culture without advocating for proletarian power.

This review treats E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism not just as an academic work, but as part of a larger ideological effort to domesticate Marxism in academia and to position Thompson as its acceptable figurehead. Focusing on chapters most relevant to his political views, the review seeks to reintroduce a perspective often overlooked in modern scholarship—a Marxist critique rooted in historical materialism rather than moral judgment.

A gifted teacher, an undisciplined historian

Thompson’s reputation as an educator has always been a key part of his legacy, and those who contributed to _E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism_ rightly highlight this aspect. He was, by all accounts, a natural teacher: lively, demanding, and driven by a belief that history matters because ordinary people matter. While his politics are subject to debate—and this review will suggest they had significant flaws—his dedication to adult education and the intellectual emancipation of working-class individuals was sincere. His years teaching extramural classes in Yorkshire for the Workers’ Educational Association not only influenced his teaching approach but also deeply impacted his historical writing. _The Making of the English Working Class_ cannot be understood without those years in church halls and community centers, listening to working-class students’ experiences and encouraging them to see themselves as active participants in history.

John Rule’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography reflects this duality effectively. Thompson’s postgraduate students at Warwick recalled him as meticulous, inspiring, and deeply devoted to their intellectual growth. He was the type of supervisor who examined drafts meticulously, encouraged students to approach history, not just theory, and regarded scholarship as a moral calling. Nonetheless, Rule also highlights the tensions between Thompson and the university. Heavy teaching responsibilities, constant meetings, and bureaucratic pressures within a rapidly growing institution left little time for research. Thompson was uncomfortable with the managerial university that developed in the 1960s and 1970s, as his temperament and politics were influenced by the older tradition of adult education, where teaching served as a social mission rather than a professional duty.

Rule’s observations on The Making are equally perceptive. The book reflects an author who challenges conventional academic norms with a lively, combative, and sometimes unrestrained language. For example, Thompson’s harsh critique of Methodism as “ritual psychic masturbation” illustrates his tendency to use strong language when moral clarity calls for it. His aversion to quantification, evident in his mocking critique of economic historians claiming that industrialisation’s benefits amounted to “a few potatoes, some cotton clothing, tea and sugar, and many articles in the Economic History Review,” was not merely stylistic but also indicated a deeper rejection of the analytical rigor associated with Marxism.

Thompson's resistance to formal analysis is central to any Marxist critique of his work. His avoidance of quantification was driven not by personal preference but by a deeper disdain for abstract, theoretical, and structural methods. Instead, he emphasized narrative, moral storytelling, and lived experience. This perspective shaped his historical techniques and political views. After leaving the Communist Party in 1956, his shift was towards a moral humanism that prioritized ethical sentiments over class analysis, rather than embracing a more rigid Marxist stance. The New Left he helped create embodied these ideas: it was anti-authoritarian, culturally open, and politically inclusive, yet lacked a coherent theory of capitalist development or proletarian action.

Thompson’s impatience with rigour permeated his work at all levels. In history, it led to a romanticised view of working-class agency that often overlooked the structural limits capitalism imposed. Politically, it produced a moral critique of Stalinism that never matured into a comprehensive critique of bureaucratic decay or serious engagement with revolutionary Marxism. For example, his debates with Althusser were not about defending Marxist methodology but about rejecting theory altogether. Thompson’s claim that “theory” was an external imposition on historical practice did not deepen Marxist analysis but signalled a retreat from it.

The contributors to E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism celebrate his teaching, his prose, and his moral passion. These qualities were real, and they help explain his enduring appeal. But they also point to the limits of his politics. Thompson’s strengths as a teacher—his immediacy, his impatience with abstraction, his belief in the primacy of lived experience—were inseparable from the weaknesses of his historical method and his political thought. A Marxist critique must therefore begin not by denying his gifts but by recognising how those gifts were bound up with a rejection of the very rigour that Marxism demands.

1956: the crisis of Stalinism

Michael Newman's chapter addresses the decisive episode in Thompson's political life. Khrushchev's "secret speech" of February 1956, followed by the Soviet invasion of Hungary that November, threw the Communist Party of Great Britain into crisis. Thompson, together with John Saville, produced the dissident Reasoner inside the party and, after leaving it, launched The New Reasoner in 1957.

Newman correctly notes that 1956 caused a leftist realignment, but his explanation overlooks the key political decision presented by the crisis. Thompson deliberately rejected Trotskyism, the only current that challenged Stalinism from Marxist and international worker perspectives. Additionally, describing the New Left Review, created in 1960 from The New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review, as a leading Marxist scholarly publication is inaccurate.

The British branch of the International Committee of the Fourth International, led by Gerry Healy, viewed the crisis as a chance to expose Stalinism as counter-revolutionary and attract the most promising individuals breaking away from the CPGB. They did so with a notable group, including Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker journalist whose Budapest reports the party suppressed, historian Brian Pearce, Cliff Slaughter, and Tom Kemp. These individuals helped found the Socialist Labour League in 1959.

Thompson was not among them, whatever Newman's attempt to place him at the centre of a "Marxist revival." The Trotskyists were sharply critical of The New Reasoner but sought political discussion. In "The New Left Must Look to the Working Class," published in Labour Review in 1959, Healy pointed out that Thompson's article entirely omitted the working class.

Healy explained that the New Left was not simply a group of people with new ideas. It reflected a phase in the crisis of capitalism, and like earlier movements among intellectuals and students, it warned of a resurgence of the working class. He wrote that the crisis first found its reflection in the battle of ideas.

Thompson had no interest in such a discussion. He responded to the SLL by accusing it of factionalism, a charge levelled at the Trotskyist movement throughout its history. Healy remarked that Thompson had discarded all the baggage he carried out of the Communist Party except "one soiled old suitcase labelled anti-Trotskyism."

The Trotskyists' fight was made harder by the revisionist tendency led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel, which split the Fourth International in 1953. The Pabloites presented Khrushchev's speech as evidence that the bureaucracy could reform itself under mass pressure and move leftward. This perspective lent credibility to those leaving the Communist Party who wanted to break with Stalin's crimes without breaking with the political outlook that had produced them.

Thompson found a warmer reception among the state-capitalist tendency of Tony Cliff, forerunner of today's Socialist Workers Party, which abandoned the defence of the Soviet Union and broke with the Fourth International around 1950. For decades that tendency has provided left cover for emigrants from Stalinism. David McNally, writing in International Socialism in 1993, called Thompson the greatest Marxist historian of the English-speaking world and credited him with a commitment to freeing Marxism from Stalinist distortion.

Socialist humanism and the New Left

The New Reasoner drew together former and current CPGB members, individuals who had passed through the Trotskyist movement, and Labour Party members. They were united by opposition to Trotskyism. Thompson was openly hostile to an international revolutionary perspective and sought instead to root his journal in a supposedly native "English" radical tradition.

Kate Soper's chapter shows that Thompson offered, in place of Marxism, what he called "socialist humanism." It is a moral and essentially utopian outlook. Its critique of Stalinism was vague by design. For Thompson, Trotskyism was merely another variant of Stalinism, a position that spared him the need to explain how the Soviet bureaucracy arose.

Even McNally conceded the point. He noted Thompson's lackadaisical attitude to scientific rigour. He acknowledged that while Thompson denounced the camps, the show trials and the police state, he never offered a clear analysis of the nature of the Stalinist regimes. That is precisely the analysis Trotsky had provided in The Revolution Betrayed two decades earlier.

Thompson never advocated building a revolutionary party. Like the New Left as a whole, he blamed Lenin's conception of the party for Stalinism. In 1959, The New Reasoner published Eric Heffer, a former Communist who later became a Labour MP, arguing that the vanguard had met a past historical need but had become a hindrance.

Thompson's dispute with Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, who took control of New Left Review in the early 1960s, and his later polemic against Louis Althusser in The Poverty of Theory (1978), have been presented as a defence of Marxism. They were nothing of the kind. They were arguments between different tendencies of the petty-bourgeois left, none of which based itself on the working class.

The subsequent evolution of New Left Review is instructive. As Julie Hyland has written on the WSWS, the journal became a meeting place for Stalinist-influenced academics and Pabloite tendencies, promoting the Frankfurt School, structuralism, Maoism, anarchism, postmodernism and a succession of other theories of student radicalism.

Theodore Koditschek's chapter discusses Thompson's lifelong engagement with socialism and Marxism while acknowledging his distance from the "dogmas" of orthodoxy. The formulation is revealing. What Koditschek calls dogma is historical materialism itself, and it is precisely this that Thompson abandoned.

The Making and the problem of consciousness

Thompson's break with historical materialism underpins The Making of the English Working Class. Despite its rich detail and undoubted literary power, the book lacks a materialist account of how the working class developed. Class appears above all as a cultural experience and a moral self-definition, rather than as a social relation rooted in the development of the productive forces.

The "history from below" genre that Thompson helped found is enjoying a revival, promoted by a section of academic historians and by groups such as the SWP. Amid the crisis of world capitalism, its popularity is understandable, and well-written works in this tradition can add to our knowledge of complex events. But its practitioners rarely examine the political origins of the method, or the politics it serves.

Its most damaging feature is how it treats consciousness. It is one thing to rescue the working class from what Thompson famously called "the enormous condescension of posterity." It is another to explain where the working class came from, and how and from where it derives its ideas.

Stuart Hall, Thompson's collaborator in the first New Left, set out their shared view in New Left Review in 2010. Against what he called the "economism" of the Stalinist, Trotskyist and Labourist left alike, Hall insisted that socialists were "made, not born." On this view, consciousness is detached from the objective processes of the mode of production.

The materialist conception of history begins from the opposite standpoint. As Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology: The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life.... We do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, to arrive at men in the flesh. We start with real, active men, and based on their real life-process, we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process.... Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

This does not equate consciousness with mere passive reflexes. Marxism argues that a revolutionary party must actively cultivate socialist awareness among the working class through deliberate struggle, grounded in a scientific grasp of the objective conditions. Thompson, Hall, and the New Left, however, rejected this approach.

Nina Power's discussion of Thompson's view of class highlights a related issue. Thompson idealized the working class and its spontaneity, while recognizing his own empirical approach. Without the praise often associated with it, his view of class tended to distinguish socialism from the working class as a revolutionary, global force. Paul Bond noted on WSWS that this form of "Marxism" was aligned with a petty-bourgeois fraction that remains closely connected to the current order.

No single review can finally settle E. P. Thompson’s place in history, nor should it try. Thompson remains a historian whose work will continue to be read, debated, and reinterpreted for decades to come. The Making of the English Working Class will endure as one of the most influential works of post‑war British historiography, not only for its narrative power but also because it opened space for history writing that took the experiences, aspirations, and cultural worlds of ordinary people seriously. Thompson’s achievement in this respect is undeniable. He restored agency to historical subjects who had long been treated as passive objects of economic forces, and he did so with a literary verve that few academic historians have matched. Future generations will continue to turn to his books for answers to the political and historical problems of their own time.

But they should read him critically. Thompson’s strengths as a historian were inseparable from his weaknesses as a Marxist. His hostility to abstraction, his suspicion of theory, and his impatience with analytical rigour were not incidental features of his work; they were constitutive of his intellectual identity. These qualities made him a compelling teacher and a vivid writer. Still, they also limited his ability to grasp the structural dynamics of capitalist development or the political logic of revolutionary movements. Thompson’s insistence on moral experience over theoretical analysis led him to elevate culture over class, agency over structure, and narrative over explanation. The result was a body of work that is rich in detail and human sympathy but often thin in its conceptual foundations.

This tension stemmed from Thompson’s political formation. Although he left the Communist Party in 1956, he never fully discarded the outlook he acquired within it—above all its hostility to Trotskyism. His break with Stalinism was moral rather than theoretical. He rejected the bureaucratic brutality of the Soviet regime, but he did not engage seriously with the Marxist critique of Stalinism developed by Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Instead, he carried into the New Left assumptions shaped by the Communist Party's ideological battles: suspicion of Trotskyist analysis, dismissal of revolutionary strategy, and a tendency to equate Marxist rigour with dogmatism. His polemics against Althusser were not a defence of Marxist method but a rejection of theory itself. His critique of Stalinism remained ethical rather than historical, grounded in moral outrage rather than a systematic account of bureaucratic degeneration.

This legacy has shaped how Thompson’s work is received. The academic celebration of Thompson as a humane socialist, a defender of civil liberties, and a champion of “history from below” has often served to domesticate Marxism within the university. Thompson becomes the acceptable face of radical history: passionate but not doctrinaire, moral but not revolutionary, cultural but not structural. The contributors to E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism largely reproduce this image. They admire his teaching, prose, and activism, but they do not confront the political limits of his method or the ideological function his work continues to serve.

A genuinely Marxist biography of Thompson remains to be written—one that situates him not as a heroic outsider but as a product of the political contradictions of the British left in the mid‑twentieth century. Such a biography would examine his formation within the Communist Party, his moralised break with Stalinism, his role in shaping the New Left, and the theoretical consequences of his hostility to Marxist rigour. It would treat Thompson not as a saint of radical history but as a complex figure whose achievements and limitations illuminate the broader crisis of socialist politics in the post‑war period.

Thompson will continue to be read, and he should be. But readers should read him with an awareness of the political choices that shaped his work and the theoretical horizons he refused to cross. Only then can we understand his legacy in its full historical and political significance.

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

1. Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor (eds.), E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism, Manchester University Press, 2013.
2. The Many-Headed Monster blog, papers from the Birkbeck symposium on "history from below."
3. Cal Winslow (ed.), E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics, Monthly Review Press, 2014.
4. John Rule, "Thompson, Edward Palmer (1924–1993)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
5. G. Healy, "The New Left Must Look to the Working Class," Labour Review, 1959.
6. David McNally, "E. P. Thompson: Class Struggle and Historical Materialism," International Socialism 61, Winter 1993.
7. Eric Heffer, article in The New Reasoner, 1959.
8. Julie Hyland, "Embittered row between UK Labour Party leader Ed Miliband and Daily Mail over his father, Ralph," WSWS, 8 October 2013.
9. Stuart Hall, "Life and Times of the First New Left," New Left Review 61, January–February 2010.
10. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, 1845–46.
11. Paul Bond, "Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932–2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism," WSWS, 5 March 2014.

 

Cromwell-An Honourable Enemy by Tom Reilly

This is a guest blog by the writer Tom Reilly. It is copyrighted further publication is at the discretion of the author.

On the morning before Oliver Cromwell swung his legs out of bed to travel to Ireland, the notion of besieging the town of Drogheda – the event that would later become the biggest blot on his career – would never have even occurred to him. That’s because Drogheda was under roundhead control that day as it had been for the lengthy duration of two whole years previously. He could simply have strolled through any of the gates of the walled town any time that day and he would have been greeted with a barrage of deferential good morning sirs.

On 11 July 1649, the town of Drogheda was captured by the royalists under Lord Inchiquin and wrested from the hands of Parliament, who had been in military occupation since the summer of 1647. It was parliamentarian soldiers who would later be accused of committing civilian atrocities at Drogheda, yet it was parliamentarian soldiers who had lived peaceably, side by side with these very same inhabitants for two long years beforehand, with no recorded evidence of discord between the military and civilian occupants whatsoever. Indeed, there is even some evidence to suggest that Cromwell’s attacking forces at Drogheda included members of roundhead regiments who had fraternised with the local populace for those two years previously. Cromwell, who would not have been aware of the royalist victory at Drogheda the previous day, left London for Ireland on 12 July 1649 to crush royalist resistance there.

But that’s not what the history books will tell you – especially Irish history books. In Irish history it is much more difficult than in the story of most other countries to reverse traditional views, and although there have been many investigators of this period at first hand, few have concluded that Cromwell was not a war criminal.

The idea that the massacre of the unarmed civilian populations of both Drogheda and Wexford by Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army did indeed take place has survived through the centuries almost perfectly intact. Indeed, it is so well constructed that it is virtually indestructible. The years bristle with the names of erudite academics who have studied Cromwell’s Irish campaign and who have produced hundreds of articles and books on the subject.

Even the most ardent Cromwell enthusiasts who have studied the period forensically have conceded that large-scale massacres of defenceless civilians occurred in September (Drogheda) and October (Wexford) 1649. Done deal. Case closed. The result of their labour is captured in short sound bytes in both past and present Irish school textbooks. In 2004, Folens published Earthlink 5th Class. On page 87 the following words are printed: ‘Cromwell captured Drogheda. About 3,000 men, women and children were killed.’ The Educational Company of Ireland released Timeline in 2008. A paragraph on page 223 reads, ‘He [Cromwell] first laid siege to Drogheda. He was determined to make an example of the town. When he captured it he slaughtered the entire population.’ There is no ambiguity there.

Such is his murderous Irish 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.

When discussing the horrific events at Drogheda in 1649, one of the ‘go to’ sources for many is the (second hand) account of the parliamentarian soldier Thomas á Wood, who fought at Drogheda and therefore could be (and often has been) described as an eyewitness. Wood reputedly tells us that children were used ‘as a buckler of defence’ by the attackers and he describes the gruesome killing of a young local girl, whom he tried to save but one of his crazed colleagues stabbed her through ‘her belly or fundament whereupon Mr Wood seeing her gasping, took away her money, jewels &c., and flung her down over the works.’

Although some have determined that Wood’s tract is melodramatic hyperbole it has generally been used in a primary source context coming directly from an eyewitness. This is a mistake. Now for the first time the stories of Thomas á Wood, which were transcribed decades later by his brother Anthony, (rendering it non-eyewitness testimony) in the context of fireside stories with which he regaled his ‘brethren’ can be revealed as unequivocally untrustworthy. The source is normally cited loosely as The Life of Anthony á Wood from the year 1632 to 1672 written by himself.

New evidence now clearly shows that this book was first compiled (not published) in 1711 by Doctor Thomas Tanner, 16 years after Anthony á Wood died and 62 years after Drogheda. Most significantly, however, is the fact that it might easily have been influenced by the hands of others and it did not see the light of day until 1772 when a Thomas Hearne edited and published it - that’s 123 years after the events!

Anthony á Wood, a staunch royalist, who was always suspected of being a Catholic had his life’s historical works published after his death in various publications, and all with different editors (including the Rev Sir J Peshall 1773, John Gutch 1786, Phillip Bliss 1813, Andrew Clark 1889), some of which included the story of his life, which in turn contains the account of his brother Thomas at Drogheda. Wood’s biography was not in fact published by himself in the literal sense but was transcribed by editor Hearne in 1772 from pocket diaries, documents and manuscripts that Wood left to Dr Tanner, among others, on his deathbed. This is not exactly what you would call an authentic primary source directly from an eyewitness. Diminishing the credibility of the source even further is the fact that Colonel Henry Ingoldsby, Thomas á Wood’s commanding officer described Thomas as having ‘an art of merriment called buffooning.’ Just the type of soldier, as Samuel Rawson Gardiner has suggested, who might make up sensational stories to impress a fireside audience.

It is important to analyse Anthony á Wood’s commentary because his is the only account that gives details of civilian deaths at Drogheda, using his brother’s lurid stories, if they even were his brother’s own lurid stories. In stark contrast to what the Wood brothers purportedly say are the actual words of Oliver Cromwell. As soon as he landed in Ireland he issued orders to his troops not to do ‘any wrong or violence to any person, not in arms or office with the enemy.’ In the main, commentators on this topic throughout antiquity tend to assume that Cromwell just ignored the fact that many of his troops simply disregarded this order and lost their self-control at Drogheda, as indeed did their commanding officer himself. But the evidence does not support this point of view.

In his declaration to the Catholic clergy in the winter of 1649, after Drogheda and Wexford Cromwell categorically denies that he has stepped outside the military domain, and on no less than ten occasions he emphasises that the ordinary unarmed people of Ireland are to be left unmolested. On one occasion he even denies that he has actually killed unarmed civilians and he is consistent in this respectful attitude to the civilian population in all of his documented utterances throughout his entire campaign in Ireland. On his approach to Drogheda he even had two of his men hanged for stealing hens from an old woman, a clear breach of his orders.

On several occasions throughout his life, Cromwell shows his abhorrence of indiscriminate civilian massacres when he hears of them. In Ireland, he unequivocally blames the Catholic clergy for the 1641 massacres of innocent Protestant settlers and outlines his revulsion of such behaviour in no uncertain terms in the above-mentioned declaration.

Also in May 1655 as Lord Protector, he is clearly horrified when he learns of the massacre by the troops of the Catholic duke of Savoy, of some 200-300 Protestants known as Waldensians who lived in the adjoining isolated Alpine valleys in Piedmont to the west of Turin. There is ample evidence from throughout his life that Cromwell’s moral threshold was high and even in this narrow context of an appreciation of his character, a massacre of unarmed blacksmiths, cobblers, innkeepers, their wives, daughters, babies and toddlers at either Drogheda or Wexford at his hands does not accord with his personality and now given these fresh insights seems ludicrous in the extreme. Those who promote Cromwell as a war criminal perpetuate the idea that he simply lost his moral compass in Ireland and returned to his old self on his return to England. This is not an inaccurate portrayal.

So where then did the allegations of civilian atrocities come from? Much store has been put into the letters (or military despatches) that Cromwell sent back to his superiors in London from both Drogheda and Wexford that outline the events at both towns in detail. In the opinion of many, the letter concerning Drogheda in particular has incriminated Cromwell, where he is alleged to have admitted that he killed ‘many inhabitants in that town in a list of the slain that appears in the official pamphlet that was printed by parliament on 2 October 1649 to officially announce the news of the fall of Drogheda.

In the pamphlet Letters from Ireland relating the Several great successes, it hath pleased God to give unto the Parliament’s forces there, in the taking of Drogheda, Trym, Dundalk, Carlingford and the Nury. Together with a list of the chief commanders, and the number of the officers and soldiers slain in Drogheda this list appears at the end of Cromwell’s letter, the last line of which reads, ‘Two thousand Five hundred Foot Soldiers, besides Staff Officers, Chyrurgeons, &c and many inhabitants.’

For the first time in 365 years, this official government document has now been analysed forensically (by me) in conjunction with the newsbooks (newspapers) of the day that also carried the exact same list of those killed. And for the first time ever it can be almost categorically said (inasmuch as anything from that period can) that the three words ‘and many inhabitants’ were NOT the words of Cromwell himself. Up to now, most early modern historians have deemed these lists (There is also a list of the composition of the garrison.) in Letters from Ireland... to have been from the quill of Old Ironsides himself. (The original letter does not survive.) But this writer’s analysis proves that the published list of those slain at Drogheda was in separate circulation to Cromwell’s letter and that it was published in no less than seven newsbooks in early October 1649 in isolation, without Cromwell’s letters directly preceding it. Furthermore, none of the newsbook writers attributes the list to Cromwell himself. It can also be shown that of the seven publications that printed the list of the slain, only two include the phrase ‘and many inhabitants’. Most significantly, this list of the slain can now be shown to have been in circulation on 22 September, TEN days before Cromwell’s letter was even opened in parliament. It can further be shown that the pamphlet was printed in haste and that these two lists were simply slotted into the available spaces on the 16-page leaflet with clear demarcation lines to separate the lists from Cromwell’s letters.

Of course, the caveat here is that these ‘many inhabitants’ may well have been armed and involved in the conflict, a scenario that is perfectly plausible since The Moderate Intelligencer of 6 September says of Drogheda that ‘every man in that kingdom fit to bear arms is in a posture of war.’ This is another inconvenient fact that is now being brought to general public attention for the first time ever and that gets in the way of the tales of indiscriminate massacres of unarmed civilians. After all, an armed civilian is no longer a civilian.

Seventeenth-century historians rightly generally disregard (or at least view with acute suspicion) the later accounts of post-Restoration writers who, when writing their memoirs, documented their accounts about this issue years afterwards (like Bulstrode Whitelocke, the Earl of Clarendon, Dr George Bate, and the officer in the regiment of Sir John Clotworthy). None of these individuals were at either Drogheda or Wexford, they were not qualified to comment, had axes to grind and all allege that Cromwell engaged in deliberate civilian massacres.

The most pragmatic way to approach the question of the origin of the deliberate civilian atrocity allegations is to separate the wheat from the chaff and identify the primary sources themselves, those that date from the year 1649 and were written in the weeks and months following the sackings of Drogheda and Wexford. These 1649 sources are well-known and mostly comprise the newsbooks of the day, the letters of those in command of the royalist army (Lord Ormond and Lord Inchiquin) and one or two private letters.

It may therefore occasion surprise for one to learn that in the eleven intervening years between the stormings of both Drogheda and Wexford and the Restoration there are just TWO contemporary accounts that allege Cromwell slaughtered the lawyers, merchants, servants, farmers, doctors, carpenters, washerwomen, widows, teenagers and children of Drogheda and Wexford.

That being the case, it is not such a wild leap of faith to identify these two individuals as the ones who instigated the civilian massacre stories – or alternatively to identify them as the ones who framed Oliver Cromwell. Sir George Wharton and John Crouch were royalist propagandists who spewed out their radical anti-government newsbooks Mercurius Elencticus and The Man in the Moon respectively on a weekly basis. Both Wharton and Crouch have been described by many early modern print experts as the purveyors of little news but lots of outlandish absurdity. Any analysis of any of their publications will reveal their penchant for lies, slander, slurs, calumny and character assassination, including crass sexual innuendo directed at Cromwell himself and his high profile parliamentary bosses. Indeed, in his edition of 7 November 1649 John Crouch decides to spread a rumour that Cromwell’s penis was shot off at Drogheda and goes into some explicit and gaudy details as to how this might affect Mrs Cromwell.

For eleven long years no other document, that we know, accuses Cromwell of civilian atrocities. There the matter should really have ended. Indeed, it is worth speculating that if the House of Cromwell, in the guise of his son Richard in the first instance, the second Lord Protector, had survived into the 1660s and beyond it is likely that both Crouch’s and Wharton’s outrageous publications would have been long cast to the mists of time.

Instead, of course, the Restoration happened when Charles II restored his royal seat on the throne and it wasn’t long before his father’s killers became the victims of vengeful royalist wrath. Not long after the bodies of Cromwell, his parliamentarian compatriot John Bradshaw and son-in-law Henry Ireton were exhumed and defiled as the chief protagonists of the failed republic, people couldn’t get to the printing presses quickly enough to destroy their reputations. The royalist James Heath was one of the first out of the traps when he published his scurrilous Flagellum, The Life and Death, Birth, Burial of O Cromwell, the Late Usurper in1660 where the author alleges that Cromwell himself ordered the massacre of 300 women around the market cross in Wexford. Indeed, Heath further alleges that those troops he ordered to carry out the dastardly deed refused and Cromwell, sneering them for their refusal, called another group of soldiers up to complete the task. Few historians take anything Heath says seriously.

Interestingly, Heath doesn’t even mention the deaths of any inhabitants of Drogheda in his heavily biased narrative. That particular privilege is left to the Catholic clergy in Ireland, who join in the post-Restoration Cromwell bashing free-for-all and now ludicrously declare that 4,000 civilians had died in Drogheda without a scrap of primary source evidence. Naturally, 4,000 dead civilians at Drogheda makes no sense whatsoever, since the population of the town was approximately 3,000 and we already know that upwards of 3,000 soldiers were slaughtered. No other source, credible or otherwise suggests for a moment that 7,000 souls lost their lives at Drogheda. Furthermore, this same body politic of the Catholic clergy had already had their say about Drogheda and Wexford in their decrees from Clonmacnoise in the winter of 1649, when there is no mention of this assertion whatsoever. And the difference in the timing? Cromwell was still alive and well, still in Ireland, and he would have dismissed such claims out of hand in the strongest possible terms, one imagines, with any talk of restoration at that point aeons away.

Among the many other fresh revelations that this writer has discovered is evidence from several different sources that suggest the civilian population of Drogheda were not even in the town by the time the 12,000 Roundheads sat down in front of the walls. For instance, there was a siege of Drogheda just eight years earlier when the Irish rebels, under the command of Sir Phelim O’Neill surrounded the entire town and reduced the population to eating rats and horses. It is difficult to believe that they would stay put to have a similar culinary experience so soon afterwards. Furthermore, Ormond was expecting a long siege and ordered all ‘superfluous’ people to depart from the town in order that the provisions (a reported nine-month supply) stored there would stretch among the soldiers over the several months they expected the siege to last. Dean Nicholas Bernard, the Protestant minister at St Peter’s Church in Drogheda in 1649, and an eyewitness, confirms that his family were sent out of the town. Bernard, who saw what happened that day and wrote a detailed account of it later, says nothing of civilian deaths.

There is no doubt that some women died in Wexford as a result of them cramming into boats and the boats sinking in the harbour in an attempt to flee the place. But they clearly died as the result of an accident and not because of a deliberate policy to kill the innocent by the New Model.

Also into this anti-Interregnum maelstrom of vengeance came the petition of the people of Wexford, who were pleading to Charles II for the restoration of their properties following the Cromwellian Plantation. Remarkably the petition writers seem to have chosen to grossly exaggerate Cromwell’s actions in Ireland in order to receive clemency from their new king. In their petition, they claim that after entering Wexford, Cromwell ‘put man, woman and child, to a very few’ to the sword, again a scenario that has no supporting contemporary evidence or eyewitness attestation. In the same petition, the writers allege that Cromwell ‘put all of the inhabitants and soldiers’ of Drogheda to the sword, an allegation that simply does not stand up since nobody who was there on that fateful day corroborates this contention. This significantly reduces the credibility of the petitioners’ sycophantic petition, which Charles II ultimately ignored anyway.

The evidence now being revealed by this writer simply hones in on whether or not Cromwell was responsible for deliberately killing large numbers of innocent, unarmed civilians in Ireland in the year 1649. Some may have died in the cross-fire, as the result of collateral damage, others definitely drowned by accident. The subsequent dreadful Cromwellian Plantation that devastated Catholic Ireland is another matter altogether and should not cloud one’s judgement when discussing these alleged war crimes. Were large numbers of innocent civilians deliberately massacred? Did Cromwell do it, or did he not? Should we still be teaching children that Cromwell indiscriminately slaughtered entire town populations? As President of the Cromwell Association, Prof John Morrill has recently announced, ‘Paradoxically, by blaming Cromwell for the much more lasting horrors of the Commonwealth period in Ireland, we let those really responsible off the hook.’

I, for one, as an Irish citizen and native of Drogheda would like to start the ball rolling and posthumously apologise to Oliver Cromwell and his family for staining his reputation. He was an honourable enemy and the victim of a huge miscarriage of historical justice. Cromwell was framed. Wharton and Crouch fitted him up.