Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context 2011 Ariel Hessayon-David Finnegan Editors- Ashgate Publishers ISBN: 9780754669050

 "The term political radicalism (or simply, in political science, radicalism) denotes political principles focused on altering social structures through revolutionary means and changing value systems in fundamental ways."[1]

To Be Radical is to Grasp Things by the Root-

 Karl Marx- The German Ideology

"It is a commonplace that the past is at the mercy of the present and that in every generation there are those who deliberately distort aspects of it to reflect a vision of their own or another's making. Most historical writing about radicalism and the English Revolution can be considered fabrication - in the sense of both manufacture and invention. There have been several critical studies documenting this process, including recent work by Mario Caricchio."  Ariel Hessayon

This collection of essays explore the terms 'radical' and 'radicalism' in the Early Modern English context. The term radical or radicalism has like all things connected with the English Revolution in the seventeenth century or political struggles in the eighteenth century come under attack by a coterie of revisionist historians.

As Edward Vallance points out in his essay Reborn John?: The Eighteenth-century The afterlife of John Lilburne:" this is a persuasive presentation of the historical influence of the radicalism of the civil war and one which reflects a broader scholarly unease with the conception of a 'radical tradition'. The notion of a tradition of radical thought was powerfully evoked in the classic works of British Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill and Edward Thompson. It retained some importance in the popular historical imagination.5 Academics have become increasingly critical, however, both of the use of the term 'radical' to describe pre-modern politics and of the idea of a continuum of radical ideas and movements. Scholars have pointed out that the term 'radical' – not in common political use until the early nineteenth century anyway – had a very different meaning in the seventeenth century, indicating not ideas that would dramatically transform the status quo but instead a return to fundamentals or the root. Using the term 'radical' in its modern sense then risks distorting the political outlook of historic individuals who did not necessarily view themselves as advocating anything new or novel. The notion of a radical tradition is now seen as equally problematic, as it implies both a similarity in radical thought over the ages and a degree of influence from one radical group to the next which often cannot be supported with empirical evidence.6 At best, the idea of a radical tradition is seen as a poor way of thinking about intellectual influence. At worst, the concept is seen as a historical fabrication, little more than an exercise in wish-fulfilment on the part of modern left-wing academics and journalists.[2]

Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context is an ambitious book that attempts to go beyond the conceptual categories which permeate the study of The English Revolution. The book is one of many recent studies that seek to clarify but ultimately fails what is meant by many of the concepts used in the Revolution. The 12 essays in this book are the product of the work presented at a conference held at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2006.

Understanding radicalism is not an easy task as it is clear the term means many things to many people. Historically some early modern historians have used the term radical or radicalism to describe the plethora of groups that took part in the English Revolution. However, even conservative historians such as Hugh Trevor-Roper had adopted the term. Radicals can also be found on the royalist side as well according to one historian in this book.

The term radical is a relatively modern concept. According to Professor Diego Lucci, "the historian Conal Condren has written that it was not until the late 18th century that 'radical' became a political term associated with extensive political and social reform, and it was not until 1819 that Jeremy Bentham coined the word 'radicalism'.[3]

One problem with several essays written by historians who are largely revisionists in nature is that they are more adept at telling us what they reject rather than arguing for what they believe. Readers who are looking for new historiography from this collection of essays will be brutally disappointed.

In the introduction, Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan make it clear that these articles do not identify with the "linguistic turn "school of historiography or otherwise known as the nominalist approach.

These historians in order to remove "anachronism" from historical study believe it is best to remove terms like radicalism from early modern historiography. In its most extreme form nominalist historians would also like to remove words such as 'puritan', 'royalist'  'antiquity', 'medieval', and 'modern'. In other words, formalism went mad.

The second approach, identified in the introduction, is called 'substantive' and is the polar opposite of nominalist. The functional approach is favoured by two divergent schools of historiography Whig and Marxist. These two trends have towered over the study of the English Revolution.

The authors in this collection of essays have rejected both Whig and Marxist historiography and have adopted a semi functionalist approach to the study of English radicalism.

Revisionists of one sort or another have sought over the last three decades to eradicate the influence of both Whig and Marxist historiography. As Hessayon and Finnegan observe correctly that even the use of the word radical has come under attack from a coterie of revisionist historians. So much so it has become increasingly difficult to keep track of the various strands of thought as regards the English Revolution.

A distorted defence of Marxist historiography was carried out by historians in and around the Communist Party of Great Britain.  They sought with varying degrees of success to apply a historical materialist method when writing and studying the various radical groups. Historians which included the likes of Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, A. L. Morton and E. P. Thompson developed the 'history from below' genre,

One of the essential features of their approach was to establish the importance of radical groups in the English Revolution. The Communist Party historians rescued them from obscurity. However, they could not escape the influence of the Stalinist controlled party of the USSR. They were following a historical and political line that came from the Stalin led Russian Communist International during the mid1930s.

As was said before, Hessayon and Finnegan do not support the linguistic but are hostile to a Marxist interpretation. They treat the matter of radicalism from a purely academic standpoint. However, such a topic as the level of radicalism in the English Revolution requires a political understanding. That is why Hessayon is hostile to "dangerous extremists" hijacking groups such as the Levellers for their modern-day political agenda.

Hessayon levelled this very same charge at the historian Edward Vallance in a review of Vallance's A Radical History of Britain for the Institute of Historical Research website. The review crossed a line in that it was a nasty and inaccurate attack.

In Vallance's book, he said "there is another purpose to Vallance's book: a political agenda. Located somewhere to the left of New Labour in Guardian, New Statesman and John Pilger reading territory (pp. 11, 38, 40–2, 430–1, 531, 551), displaying an evident if understandable distaste for Thatcherism (pp. 52, 228, 260), A Radical History of Britain is intended as a celebration of the British people's capacity for dissent and, when necessary, recourse to direct action in defending their liberties and securing new rights (pp. 11, 13, 18, 38–9, 119–21, 181, 201, 526–7). Nor to Vallance's mind is his narrative a record of heroic failure, but rather a testament to the achievements of British radicals and revolutionary movements".

He continues "As historians, we have a collective responsibility to maintain the highest standards of scholarly rigour, especially when undertaking the challenging yet rewarding business of educating non-specialists. Furthermore, shaping aspects of the past to advance present-day political goals is a practice almost as old as the discipline itself. Anyone engaged in this enterprise, however, must take the greatest care not to legitimise the indefensible or give ammunition to dangerous extremist".

Vallance correctly sought to defend the integrity of his work. "It is rather difficult for me to respond to Dr Hessayon's review, not least because he appears to be offering a critique of quite a different book from the one that I have written. In particular, I am baffled by his repeated references to the British National Party (eight in all) within his review, where he refers to the BNP twice as many times as I do within the whole 600 + pages of my A Radical History of Britain. To put this in perspective, there are almost as many references to him within my book as there are to that far-right party.

" So it is with some puzzlement that I met Dr Hessayon's suggestions that my book may provide 'ammunition to dangerous extremists'. I realise that many readers of Reviews in History will not have looked at my work, so I provide here a key passage from p. 549: This yoking together of freedom and Britishness has continued, through the writing of George Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn, to the present day, with Gordon Brown's calls for a new sense of national identity constructed around British values of 'liberty, tolerance and fair play. The BNP would certainly struggle to live up to the second of those values. It is hard to see how British radical movements such as the Chartists, which included prominent black members and supported the abolition of the slave trade, or the suffragettes, who included leading anti-colonialists such as Sylvia Pankhurst, can fit into the BNP's bleached-white vision of Britain. Yet, in the radical tradition's appropriation by the far-right, we can nonetheless see some of the dangers in claiming universal values such as tolerance, fairness and liberty as peculiarly British. More recently another right-wing group has claimed allegiance to the radicals throughout history. During the recent by-election victory of the UKIP at Rochester the newly elected MP Mark Reckless believed that his party stood in the "radical tradition," one that historically "took power away from the elites and spread it to the people. It is the tradition of Levellers, Chartists, and Suffragettes."

Vallance continues "Overall, this seems an eccentric reading of my book, especially given my left-leaning politics which will be evident to anyone who has read my New Statesman articles or heard my talks at Demos or Republic: The Campaign for an Elected Head of State. His points concerning Dr Dunn and Dr Harvey's works aside, Dr Hessayon's review offers little serious engagement with my work and, in my view, breaches the IHR's standards for scholarly debate".

If Hessayon wanted to attack Vallance properly, he could have pointed out that while Britain did have a radical tradition, this was not somehow unbroken. The theory of an unbroken radical tradition largely stems from the Communist Party Historians Group.

As Philip Bounds pointed out in his outstanding essay Orwell and Englishness: in the section titled The Dialogue with British Marxism "British Communism and the "English Radical Tradition"  he states "The idea of Englishness became an obsession for British communists after the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935. (The Communist International or "Comintern" had been established in Moscow in 1919. Its function was to determine the policies of the various pro-Soviet Communist Parties which came into existence in the wake of the October Revolution.) Meeting at a time when Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy posed an increasingly evident threat to international order, the Seventh Congress was primarily important for determining communist strategy towards the growth of fascism. The most famous speech was delivered by the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov, newly appointed President of the Comintern, who had become a hero throughout the world movement after being acquitted by a Nazi court on charges of burning down the Reichstag (Germany's parliament) in 1933. After defining fascism as "the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital," 5 Dimitrov insisted that communists should now give priority to defending established democratic institutions against the fascist attempt to overthrow them. This could best be done by uniting all anti-fascists, including those whom the communists had previously dismissed as "bourgeois" (e.g. liberals and even progressive conservatives), into nationally based "People's Fronts."

This political line was catastrophic and paved the way for numerous defeats of the working class. It did, however, provide the historians of the Communist Party the possibility of examining subjects such as the English Revolution and the in particular radicals without coming into conflict with the leadership in Moscow.

As Bounds continues from 1935 onwards, in a flurry of intellectual activity, many of the CPGB's leading writers made a sustained effort to excavate the history of what was usually called the "English radical tradition." The body of work that they produced can broadly be divided into two categories. On the one hand, there was a series of writings that traced the history of the plebeian revolt in Britain since the Peasants' Rising of 1381. These were supplemented by a more extensive (though perhaps not so influential) group of works which explored the influence of radical ideas on a selection of Britain's most famous writers — Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens among them.”

The Beauty of Holiness

The book opens with the chapter The Beauty of Holiness and the Poetics of Antinomianism Richard Crashaw, John Saltmarsh and the Language of Religious Radicalism in the 1640s. Nicholas McDowell essay examines the language of religious radicalism in the 1640s, with a special focus on the poems of Richard Crashaw and John Saltmarsh.

McDowell adopts a reformist rather than a revolutionary position as regards the radical groups as seen in this quote. "The most sensible discussion of radicalism in the English Revolution is the third of G. E. Aylmer's four presidential addresses to the Royal Historical Society on 'Collective Mentalities in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England'. In his paper on 'Varieties of Radicalism', delivered in 1987, Aylmer quickly dispenses with the nominalist wrangling that continues to obsess historians. I quote his opening two sentences: 'Since the terms radical and radicalism were not in use before the nineteenth century, it may reasonably be asked what they signify when applied to the mid-seventeenth century. The answer is a pragmatic one: by radical I mean anyone advocating changes in state, church and society which would have gone beyond the official programme of the mainstream Puritan-Parliamentarians in the Long Parliament and the Assembly of Divines.'[1] Aylmer immediately and with a minimum of fuss defines the context for discussing radicalism in the English Revolution. Having dispensed with the circular debate over naming, Aylmer proceeds to get on with trying to characterise the distinguishing features of mid-seventeenth-century radicalism.[4]

McDowell follows Hessayon lead in opposing historians who have adopted the linguistic turn. He writes If we are not to call 'radical' the writers I discuss at length in the book - the 'Ranter' Coppe, the Levellers Walwyn and Richard Overton, the Quaker Samuel Fisher, the Fifth Monarchist John Rogers - then what exactly are we to call them? 'Sectarian' will hardly do".

Jason Peacey's chapter Radicalism Relocated: Royalist Politics and Pamphleting of the Late 1640s is an indicator of the growing interest in Royalist politics and their use of pamphlets. Peacey is open to the idea that radical politics permeated every aspect of everyday life.

According to Diego Lucci, "Peacey stresses that radical ideas, especially in matters of religious, social and political reform, penetrated various areas of English politics and, therefore, were shared by different, and sometimes clashing, milieus. Therefore, Peacey argues that radicalism was a phenomenon largely independent from the distinctions between Royalists and Parliamentarians, and influenced both sides of the political spectrum."

Mario Caricchio's News from the New Jerusalem; Giles Calvert and the Radical experience Mario Caricchio's section concentrates on how bookselling and pamphleteering influenced political and religious debates of the English Revolution. Caricchio focuses on Giles Calvert, one of the main publishers and booksellers in England between 1641 and 1660. Caricchio maintains that Calvert's bookshop was part of a broader network of social networks.

As Caricchio said, in a 2006 essay "Radicalism and English revolution are not on a high road but at a crossroads. Historians seem to place them where a number of contexts intersect. This could be an answer to the question of the "nature of the English revolution", which, as John Morrill put it by citing Hill, required attention to be paid more to "environment" than to "heredity".[36] This is a two-sided issue. On the one hand, there is the radicalisation of conflict that shattered the unity of the "political nation" at the beginning of the 1640s and precipitated England into the civil war. On the other hand, there is the problem of late 1640s radicalism, which Morrill, envisaging a comparison between the Levellers and the Clubmen, raised in a stimulating question: how "Leveller pamphlets and petitions combined deeply regressive economic and social ideas with a core commitment to religious liberty and a political doctrine born of the experience of Independent churches, all bound together in an innovative natural rights framework"? In this question and its possible answer, popular participation and radical ideas still stand at the heart of the matter. The varieties of the English religious experience together with the widening or thickening publicity of discourses seem to be the decisive turning on the map: where the last war of religion becomes a revolution".[5]

Gerrard Winstanley: Radical Reformerby  Ariel Hessayon is a continuation of Hessayon's attack on left-wing historians. In an essay in 2006, he attacks Christopher Hills evaluation of the Digger leader Winstanley."In 1973 Hill's edition of Winstanley's selected writings was published by Penguin. His introduction portrayed Winstanley in modern dress as an advocate of 'human progress', 'reason' and 'international brotherhood'; an author whose insights 'may be of interest to those in the Third World today who face the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society'. Here again was a radical, mostly secular Winstanley whose biblical language and 'high-flown metaphorical style' was worth penetrating in the same way that readers had to get through the 'Hegelian jargon' to understand the early Marx. [76] In a subsequent essay 'From Lollards to Levellers' (1978) Hill attempted to provide both genealogy and ecology for 'lower-class' radicalism by exploring the continuity of radical ideas within an orally transmitted 'underground tradition'. His focus was on doctrinal and geographical continuities, particularly in pastoral, forest, moorland and fen areas where ecclesiastical control was less tight. But if in retrospect the 1970s represented a pinnacle in Hill's writing on radicalism, it was also during this decade that his work was most severely attacked. Indeed, Hill's preoccupation with twentieth-century ideological struggles and his moralising tone made his work vulnerable to charges of being obsessively present-centred, of putting theory above facts. And it must be said that he used evidence inaccurately and selectively, depending almost entirely on printed sources. Ultimately Hill's vision of the past is largely unconvincing, revealing much about his agenda while misleading readers unfamiliar with the evidence. To quote Montaigne: People are prone to apply the meaning of other men's writings to suit opinions that they have previously determined in their minds."

Hill, as far as I can make out, did not reply directly to any of these attacks. But I will. Attacking a historian for his politics is one thing, but accusing a historian of fabricating history is another and has no place in any historians debate. The attack on Hill and the CPHG is reminiscent of J .C. Davis in the 1980s. Davis's great theory was that most of the radical groups that existed during the English Revolution were figments of the imagination of left-wing historians such as Hill. A similar line of attack was taken by historian Alastair MacLachlan in his extraordinarily provocative book The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England: Essay on the Fabrication of Seventeenth-Century History. MacLachlan should be made to retract his accusations and issue an apology.

To conclude, this collection of essays continues a revisionist trend to downplay the radicals in the English Revolution. There are some worthwhile essays, but overall the book disappoints.

---

[1]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_radicalism

[2] Reborn John?: The Eighteenth-century Afterlife of John Lilburne

Edward Vallance- https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/74/1/1/825488

[3] https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1157

[4] N. McDowell , "Writing the Literary and Cultural History of Radicalism in the English Revolution", www.cromohs.unifi.it/seminari/mcdowell.html> 

[5]  M. Caricchio, "Radicalism and the English Revolution", in M. Caricchio, G. Tarantino, eds., Cromohs Virtual Seminars. Recent historiographical trends of the British Studies (17th-18th Centuries), 2006-2007

Killers of the King - The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I Hardcover – 11 Sep 2014 352 pages Bloomsbury Publishing - ISBN-13: 978-1408851708

Killers of the King - The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I Hardcover – September 11th 2014 352 pages Bloomsbury Publishing - ISBN-13: 978-1408851708

"When you strike at a king, you must kill him."

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Book of Numbers [35 v. 33]

The bestselling historian Charles Spencer new book tells the stories of the men that dared to kill a king. It is an understatement to say this is an interesting subject. A belief widely held amongst historians and the general reading public.

His trial and subsequent execution was a watershed moment in British and world history. The only people to kill a king. As Blair Worden writes "the beheading of Charles I on January 30th, 1649, left an indelible mark on the history of England and on the way that the English think about themselves. It was the climactic moment of the Puritan Revolution, and it also changed the whole character of the conflict. Most of the people who had taken up arms against Charles I seven years earlier was opposed to his killing, if not outraged by it. They knew that it would destroy their cause, though they could not have foreseen how lasting the condemnation of the regicide would be".[1] 

Charles Spencer's new book is a splendid, narrative-driven boo and is part of a large number of narrative-driven books recently published. It would appear that this particular historical genre is on the up. As Tom Holland flamboyantly points out "Imagine the Odessa File re-written by Christopher Hill, and you will have some idea of the pleasure to be had in reading Killers of the King. The virtues of a thriller and scholarship are potently combined".[2]

Not all historians are fans of narrative-based historical writing. When C V Wedgwood produced her splendid book A King Condemned-The Trial and Execution of Charles Ist, it was criticized by some historians. In the foreword of  the 2011 edition, Clive Holmes said: "Wedgwood's relationship with academic historians was not an easy one, and the immediate reception of this work by the professionals in their flagship journals was cool and even condescending." This silly snobbery is why there have been no academic reviews of Spencer's book.

In terms of historiography Spencer's book is part of a new wave of studies concentrating on different aspects of the Royalist cause. Royalism during and after the English revolution is a legitimate subject for study. It is surprising to discover as I am sure Spencer would have found a dearth of serious academic studies of the trial and execution of the king and subsequent politics contained within the trial and execution of the regicides.

It is a richly, rewarding subject to study, so it is hard to understand why such an important event in the history of both Britain and the world has been so under-researched. Outside of C V Wedgewood's The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I there is Jason Peacey's, The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I  December 7th 2001, Why Was Charles I Executed? 2007 by Clive Holmes and last but no means least in 2010 we have The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man who sent Charles I to the Scaffold by Geoffrey Robertson apart from these there is little on offer.

Like many other studies of the English revolution, the study of why and how early the revolutionists were prepared to kill the king. Clive Holmes defends the view that the regicides knew exactly what they were doing when they executed the king and had prepared for his killing a good few years before. Spencer broadly agrees with this viewpoint.

Not all historians agree with Holmes. Sean Kelsey argued that the New Model Army and the purged Long Parliament had no wish to see the king dead when they brought him to trial on charges of committing treason against his people.

Sean Kelsey argued in his essay The Ordinance for the Trial of Charles I that parliament had a significantly bigger role in bringing the king to execution than had previously thought. Kelsey believes that far too little attention has been paid to the role of parliament in bringing about the trial of the king.

A contemporaneous print showing the 1649 execution of Charles I outside the Banqueting House, Whitehall, London

"The ordinance passed by the Commons on January 1st, 1649 has never aroused much interest amongst historians of the English Revolution, one of whom has remarked that "formal documentary evidence for this (first) tribunal is lacking." Neither the House of Lords Record Office, not the principal collections of parliamentary papers has yielded the secrets of the Ordinance. A search of the National Archives of Scotland has not yet located a copy of the Common's measure which the commissioners of Edinburgh parliament resident at Westminster in January 1649 sent to their superiors shortly after its passage in the English lower house".[3]

The trial and execution of the king were the high point and culmination of a long and protracted process. The high point of that process was the English Revolution. The theory of the high road to revolution has come under heavy attack from revisionist historians. Admittedly the men who started the revolution against the king did not start to kill him but to make revolutionary changes in 1642 for "king and parliament" but ended it cutting the kings head off. It is not Spencer's fault that his book does not explain this contradiction. The problem is not Spencer's ability as a writer but his method or theory of historical events.

He could have consulted even an out and out revisionist historian such as Blair Worden who perceptibly writes, "Yet wars, once embarked upon, have to be won. The fighting and winning of them can radically extend their aims. The New Model Army, raised in 1645 to end the carnage, acquired revolutionary goals in both politics and religion. Only slowly did its generals come to contemplate trying the king. The decisive event was the Second Civil War, fought in 1648. It centred on an invasion by a Scottish army, with whose leaders Charles had been conspiring even as he negotiated, ostensibly in good faith, for his restoration of the English parliament. In 1647 Oliver Cromwell and his ally and son-in-law Henry Ireton had conducted their negotiations with him. Now they concluded that Charles's inherent duplicity would wreck any settlement. There could be no lasting peace, they decided, while he remained alive".[4]

His concentration on the narrative to the detriment of theory does not get us very far. While it is important to understand what went through the minds of the leading actors of the revolution such as Cromwell, Ireton, and Harrison to do so would only give us a one-sided understanding of why a king's head was cut off and a republic established. Spencer is free to adopt whatever theoretical approach he wants to portray historical events but the rise of narrative history has been at the direct expense of a materialist understanding of the revolution.

As Karl Marx correctly points out "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. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.”[5]

A snapshot of the regicides shows that they came from diverse social backgrounds but were united by their opposition to the king. They were not conscious revolutionists they were however to varying degrees conscious of their role as "ideologists of the revolution (who) ransacked the Bible, and half-understood historical precedent for some kind of theory to explain what they were doing".

The most politically aware of the revolutionists were astute enough to know that when they executed their king after a complicated trial with long deliberation, it was the result not of an accident or misunderstanding. Many soldiers from the New Model Army who were mainly drawn from smallholders and lower yeomanry were acutely aware of what and more importantly, why they moved against the king. When the Cornet George Joyce captured the king, he was challenged by Charles who asked him where he received his commission Joyce is reported to have waved his sword towards his troops and replied: " here is my commission."

It cannot be denied that the killing of the king had as Ann Talbot recounts  “ a profound revolutionary significance entailing a complete break with the feudal past. Although the Monarchy was later restored and the triumphant bourgeoisie was soon eager to pretend that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, no monarch sat quickly on the throne after that event until quite late in Victoria's reign".[6]

The Killers of the King is Spencer's third book covering the English Civil War.  The author was recently asked why this subject and answered "the three most important history books that I have written have concentrated on the period 1642-1704 – quite a short period, in fact. I am not the first to be intrigued by the English Civil War – but my particular interest is in the characters involved: there seem to have been so many huge personalities active during that time of massive, national, upheaval. For me, history has always been more about people watching than dry statistics and dates. The mid-to-late seventeenth century provides very rich pickings indeed”.

The book and the author have received a substantial amount of interest from the media partly because of the subjects dramatic content. The book is very well written and very well researched and is beautifully illustrated.   It is not for the fainthearted as Spencer at times goes into graphic detail of the punishment handed out to the king killers. Many after all were hung drawn and quartered and their genitals cut off and innards burned before their eyes while still alive.

Spencer's book at times reads like a novel. He shows that leading figures of the revolution turned on their former colleagues and hunted them down.  One was Sir George Downing of Downing Street fame, and described by Samuel Pepys as "that perfidious rogue," he plotted and went to the Continent, kidnap and if necessary murder then and there his former friends or bundle them back to England to stand trial and certain execution.

It would appear from the book that the reign of Charles was dominated by this manhunt. While sanctioning what amounted to judicial murder, the regime was hardly a picture of stability. The longer the show trial went on, the more nervous Charles and his ministers became and recognized the growing danger of rebellion. Charles II made one mistake in giving a public funeral to one of the regicides over twenty thousand people attended testifying the still considerable support held for Republican ideas.

As I said above Spencer's understanding of why Charles II would undertake a risky thing to try his father's killers is very limited and tends to put the trial down to pure revenge as Spencer states "Charles II naturally loathed those who had seen to his father's beheading. He was unable to exact vengeance on all those who had fought for parliament, of course – approximately half the nation; but he was allowed to bring down retribution on the regicides. Originally he was only looking to make seven of them suffer, but many – especially in the House of Lords – wanted all those intimately involved in Charles I's death to die. 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."

.

Spencer further elaborates on this matter "Killers of the King starts with the fall of Charles I, and then his trial and execution. But the driving narrative is what happened to the many diverse men who came together to end his life. On the whole, these were not people with a grand background – they included a butcher's son, a jeweller, a brewer, and a tanner of hides – men who had risen through merit to regimental command in Parliament's New Model Army. British history tends inevitably to be seen through a royal prism, because – apart from the 11 years between Charles I's death and Charles II's restoration, of course – we have always had a monarchy".

One would normally expect Earl Spencer to side with one of his own in the matter of the regicide of the king but the opposite would appear to be the case, As Spencer says "I started the book with a view that I would end up being hugely sympathetic to Charles I as a victim of a kangaroo court, but, as I researched the extraordinary drama of the civil war it had thrown up, these intriguing, individuals whose stories were so fascinating and diverse. Getting to know some of the key regicides in greater depth meant I sympathized with them much more," says Spencer, who despite being an Earl, would have sided with parliament had he been alive at the time.

His book is not a radical history of the English revolution. The author if anything is sympathetic to the Whig interpretation of history. Spencer believes that the civil war was a progressive development and supports Geoffrey Robertson's contention that  "the proceeding against Charles I in 1649 secured the constitutional gains of the Civil War – the supremacy of Parliament, the independence of judges, an individual freedom guaranteed by Magna Carta and the common law".

Spencer adds "I do believe the king had to die for England to have a hope of peace. He was impossible to trust, and the one thing you had to be like a ruler was decisive otherwise you were too weak to survive. The whole of society was changing in a fundamental way, and something drastic has to happen. Sadly for Charles, it was being decapitated. But despite my feelings against him as a king, I have enormous personal regard for him as a man. He was a gentle, church-loving, chess playing figure. I feel very sorry for him, but I also think those who put him to death were very brave men."

Another striking aspect of the book and Spencer gives ample room space to is how people who were once leading members in the Cromwellian era shifted their allegiances like some people change a shirt.

Charles Monck, who has always struck me as a person of extreme opportunism was "a turncoat of heroic proportions". He had been commander in chief of the English army in Scotland and an ardent follower of Cromwell. But after being promised the unheard-of sum of £100,000 a year for the rest of his life changed sides and decided to do the king's dirty work. It would have added to Spencer's book if he had investigated this phenomenon further. Another perceived weakness of the book is the fact that he never actually addresses what happened to the revolution. Why was it so easy for a regime change so shortly after Cromwell's death?

One severe weakness of the book is that it fails to convey how the regicides lost power and a monarchy was established albeit with the help of substantial sections of the bourgeoisie. The book is absent as to the political and economic makeup of the Charles ll regime. The trial far from just being about revenge was a counter-revolution by sections of the bourgeoisie who were still firmly connected to the Monarchy.

As James Holstun's correctly states "What turned the tide was the failure of bourgeois republican revolutionaries to unify themselves militarily, and create an interest and stake in the republic among the copyholders, soldiers, sailors and apprentices; and the superior power of General Monck and the forces of Restoration in shaping and controlling the army". To conclude Spencer's book is theoretically light and is not in the same case as Wedgewood. It could have been improved if he had used previous academic research. However, I would recommend the book and would grace any bookshelf.

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[1] The Execution of Charles I- https://www.historytoday.com/archive/execution-charles-i

[2] https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/killers-of-the-king-9781408851715/

[3] The Ordinance for the trial of Charles I-Sean Kelsey-Historical Research- Volume 76, Issue 193

[4] The Execution of Charles I- https://www.historytoday.com/archive/execution-charles-i

[5] Part I: Feuerbach.The opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook-German Ideology- https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm

[6] "These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill

By Ann Talbot-25 March 2003- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html

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/

E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism Edited by Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor. Published: February 2013 256 pages Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published in 2013 E P Thompson and English Radicalism is a collection of essays to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of E. P. Thompson's most famous book, The Making of the English Working Class. Manchester University Press has produced a stylish and very well designed book cover that reminds one of a Soviet propaganda poster from the 1920s or 30s.

The book has been warmly received Sheila Rowbotham called it an "eloquent set of essays manages to address, both sympathetically and critically, the many and varied aspects of Thompson's life, as a historian, a teacher, a poet, a political activist, a Marxist and libertarian, and an Englishman and a cosmopolitan. 

Thompson's legacy is hugely relevant for the troubled times in which we now live.' [1]Mary Kaldor, from the London School of Economics and Political Science, called it "A major book on Edward Thompson, who died 20 years ago, is an important reminder of the loss of English radicalism and the need to revive it."

The book has appeared at the same time as a veritable cottage industry of material relating to the life and work of E P Thompson. It is after all fifty years since Thompson published his seminal work The Making of the English Working Class. Harvard University held a conference on the book. Birkbeck University held a conference entitled the future of 'history from below: an online symposium, papers from the conference can be found at the many-headed monster blog[2]. Lastly, Monthly Review Press has just released  E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays & Polemics Carl Winslow (Editor)

It is impossible to examine every chapter of the book, and it is certainly impossible in a review to discuss every aspect of E P Thompson's work as a politician and historian, some of this will be done in a review of Carl Winslow's new book on Thompson mentioned. The fact that his work is still being translated all over the globe that new books about his life and work appear almost daily is testimony alone to his historical and political significance.

Thompson was a natural teacher. He had a passion for teaching. Whether you agreed with his politics or his interpretation of historical events he sought to imbue in his student a passion for history and learning. He had a partisan approach to education in that it should have a social purpose.

John Rule, in his Biography of E P Thompson for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, said  "ith his postgraduate students his relationship was excellent. They remember with affection a painstaking and inspiring mentor, and most became lifelong friends. With the university itself, relations were more strained. Resources for the centre were short of his expectation; undergraduate teaching took up much time, as did boards and meetings, leading him to complain that little time was left for writing. His writing was itself undergoing a shift. The Making carried marks of having been written by someone not fully bound by academic conventions. It is invective, for example in its infamously hostile depiction of Methodism as 'ritual psychic masturbation,' could be immoderate. He had a blind spot when it came to quantification, and a glimpse of his feelings towards some academic tendencies is exemplified in a passage which summarizes the average worker's share in the benefits of the industrial revolution as: 'more potatoes, a few articles of cotton clothing for his family, soap and candles, some tea and sugar, and a great many articles in the Economic History Review".

Given the number of books, papers, lectures, and conferences examining every aspect of Thompson's life and writing it is extremely disturbing that none of it has been given over to an Orthodox Marxist criticism of his work both in politics and history. It would appear that an orthodox Marxist critique of his work is still a taboo subject and has been largely airbrushed out of history. Given the current climate of hostility to genuine Marxism in academia, this is not a major surprise. For the sake of balance and the historical record and more important historical truth, an orthodox Marxist position should be given space in future books on Thompson.

Thompson spent most of his academic career distancing himself from life inside the British Communist Party. His criticism of Stalinism was not from an orthodox Marxist position; instead, he advocated a type of "socialist humanism". Thompson at an early age rejected the classical Marxism of Leon Trotsky despite later breaking with Stalinism it is clear that Thompsons' subsequent historical and political writings were still retained baggage from his Stalinist past.

While the Communist Party of Britain did attract a large number of historians, it was still an appalling training school and Thompson never entirely abandoned all that he learned there. An orthodox biography of Thompson is long overdue. The purpose of this review is to examine certain aspects of Thompson's work mentioned in the book. Therefore the chapters discussed will not flow in numerical order.

Michael Newman discusses what is perhaps the most significant period in Thompson's life. From 1956 it is clear that the crisis that developed within world Stalinism over Khrushchev's semi-secret denunciation of some of Stalin's crimes impacted profoundly on Thompson and other historians that were around or in the Communist Party Historians group.     

                    

Newman is correct to point out that with the development of Khrushchev's speech the crisis of the Communist Party brought about a realignment of radical politics. Thompson's answer was to reject a path towards Orthodox Marxism represented by the Fourth International, he instead created the first New Reasoner and later the New Left Review (NLR).

Newman's description of the NLR as an "Internationally renowned organ of Marxist scholarship" was way off beam. A useful work, Intellectual Radicalism after 1989: Crisis and Re-orientation in the British and the American Left by Sebastian Berg (2017), traces the evolution of left academia following the collapse of Stalinism.

Among the many responses to the collapse of Stalinism, perhaps one of the most stupid came from  G. A. Cohen, Canadian-British philosopher and "analytical Marxist," who said "It is true that I was heavily critical of the Soviet Union, but the angry little boy who pummels his father's chest will not be glad if the old man collapses. As long as the Soviet Union seemed safe, it felt safe for me to be anti-Soviet. Now that it begins, disobligingly, to crumble, I feel impotently protective toward it." What can one say about this pathetic comment—except that it has nothing whatsoever to do with Marxism?[3].

The orthodox Marxists or Trotskyists in the Fourth International which was led in Britain by Gerry Healy of the Socialist Labour League (SLL), saw the crisis within the British Communist party as an opportunity to insist on the counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism. Healy went on an offensive to win the most important cadre from the breakup of the Communist Party. Those figures who had not been entirely corrupted by the years of lies and calumny of the Stalinist regimes throughout the world were won to orthodox or classical Marxism. Cliff Slaughter, Tom Kemp and Peter Fryer.

Suffice to say Thompson was not one of them despite Newman's attempt to portray Thompson as being at the centre of a "Marxist revival." Marxists inside the SLL were hostile to the New Reasoner's politics but were open to debate. In an article from Labour Review October –November 1959 edition Healy was mindful of the sharp polemics that Thompson had been involved in and sought in his article called - The New left Must Look to the Working Class to open a debate with Thompson and his supporters.

Healy did not mince his words when he said "What strikes one immediately on reading E P Thompson's article is that he entirely omits the working class; consequently, there is no attempt to analyze the relationship between the left of today and the working class. One would imagine that the New Left had just arrived and existed in a world of its own. The opposite, of course, is the case.

The New Left is not just a grouping of people around some new ideas that they have developed independently. This new development on the left reflects a particular phase in the elaboration of the crisis of capitalism, which for socialists is the crisis of the working-class movement. Like movements among intellectuals and students in the past, the recent emergence of the new left is the advance warning of a resurgence of the working class as an active political force in Britain. The crisis which is the basis of such action finds its first reflection in the battle of ideas."

During the early years of Thompson's magazine the New Reasoner, it was clear that he did not intend to have a debate with the Trotskyists. Despite Healy trying to secure cordial relations with Thompson and his supporters, it became increasingly clear that Thompson did not see the Trotskyist's around Healy as being a part of the working class. Healy's response was to say that "Comrade Thompson seems to have cast away all the luggage, he was equipped within the Communist Party except one soiled old suitcase labelled anti-Trotskyism." Thompson's response to the SLL was to accuse it of factionalism. An epithet I might add that has been levelled at the Trotskyist movement throughout its history.

At the same time that Healy sought to clarify the issues involved in the crisis of world Stalinism Pseudo Left groups such as the Socialist Workers Party started to muddy the water and tried to argue that despite Khrushchev's speech, there was "a process of self-reform" going on and that under pressure from the working class Stalinism would move in a revolutionary direction.

Thompson would get a warmer reception from groups such as the British SWP who broke from the Fourth International in the early 1940s. The SWP also sought to profit from the crisis in world Stalinism. The New Left was courted by the SWP, and some of its leaders spoke at numerous SWP events. The SWP has for the last 50 or so years sought to give these emigrants from Stalinism a left cover and justified their reformist and nationalist adaptation and orientation.

According to SWP member David Mcnally E P Thompson, "was the greatest Marxist historian of the English-speaking world and had a "political commitment to freeing Marxism from the terrible distortions of Stalinism, a commitment which originated in the battles of 1956 within the official Communist movement" [4].

Thompson founded the New Reasoner in 1957 along with historian John Saville. The group was made up of ex- and current members of the CPGB, a varied group of common elements which left the Fourth International, and members of the Labour Party. The group was characterized by its opposition to the orthodox Marxists represented by the Fourth International.

Thompson was avowedly hostile to its international revolutionary perspective and sought to imbue his new publication with an "English Marxist" tradition. As Kate Soper writes that Thompson rejected orthodox Marxism, and in its stead, he offered up a form utopian socialism entitled socialist humanism. To distance himself from orthodox Marxism, he entered into a series of reckless, stage-managed and convoluted polemics against a series of academics, intellectuals who in one form or another had been mistakenly labelled Marxists.

It is not in the realm of this review to go into detail Thompson's polemics, but an evaluation of Thompson's socialist humanism is overdue.  Firstly it must be said that this theory has nothing to do with Marxism.  Thompson's critique of Stalinism had as one writer said a "certain sense of vagueness." For Thompson Trotskyism was just another "variant of Stalinism."

Despite McNally's glorification of Thompson, he makes an interesting point when he noted that Thompson had a " lackadaisical attitude toward scientific rigour.  'For all its moral and political fervour, there was something remarkably imprecise about his attack on Stalinism. Thompson described his as a 'moral critique of Stalinism' - and there is much to be said for that.

Whatever its limitations, revolutionary socialists can only applaud a critique that refuses to countenance slave labour camps, show trials, mass murder, a police state regime of lies and crimes against human rights, as authentic forms of socialism. But alongside the vigour of moral denunciation, one needs a clear analysis of the nature of the regimes at issue. At no time did Thompson offer the latter."

At no stage of his chequered history did Thompson and his friends in the New Left advocate the need to build a Leninist-type party. To do so would as Thompson believed would lead directly back to Stalinism. The New Left explicitly rejected Lenin's theory of the vanguard party, which it blamed for the development of Stalinism. On this matter, Thompson invited a former  Stalinist turned Labour Party bureaucrat Eric Heffer to write an article in the New Reasoner in 1959,  Heffer's views fitted in nicely with Thompsons when he wrote that  "The 'Vanguard corresponded to a given historical need but is not essential today: in fact, it is a definite hindrance".[5]

E.P. Thompson and his New Left Review colleagues sought to imbue every article he wrote with the spirit of a new "humanist" version of Marxism. As Julie Hyland points out "In the ensuing decades, it acted as a meeting place for Stalinist-influenced historians and other academics and members of the pseudo-left groups such as the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. Its various authors offered combined advocacy of Western Marxist philosophies, the Frankfurt school, French structuralism, Maoism, anarchism, post-modernism, and various other petty-bourgeois theories of student radicalism.[6]

As Theodore Koditschek writes Thompson began a "lifelong engagement with the politics of socialism and Marxism." It should be clear that Thompson's Marxism had nothing to do with the "dogmas of orthodox Marxism as Koditschek puts it... "Class rather Classes is a highly misleading phrase.

Thompson's rejection of a historical materialist method in examining historical phenomena underpins his most famous work the Making of the English Working Class. The book is deeply flawed in the absence of any materialist understanding of the development of the working class.

Despite the popularity of the book, Thompson's methodology has caused significant damage. His use of the history from the below genre is now being revitalized by a growing section of historians, and radical groups such as the British Socialist Workers Party.

History from below or people's history genre has become increasingly popular during the current social, economic and political turmoil caused by the latest crisis facing the capitalist system. It is not to say that this genre does not have its merit. Books that are written well can add to our understanding of complex historical events or processes.

But books and more precisely the historians who have written essays using the methodology either underestimate or deliberately leave out not only the origins of this type of history but the politics of such history writing.

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the genre is its disdain for an understanding of the role consciousness plays in history. To be more precise how that knowledge comes about. It is one thing to rescue the working class from the past it is another to understand not only where it came from but how and where it gets its ideas from.

Stuart Hall, who collaborated with Thompson on the New left project writing in NLR in 2010, shared Thompson's downplaying of the need for historical materialist understanding when it came to the origins of the working class.  "We had a deep conviction that against the economism of the Stalinist, Trotskyist and Labourist left alike, socialism was a conscious democratic movement and socialists were made, not born or given by the inevitable laws of history or the objective processes of the mode of production alone." [7]

If historians like Hall had bothered to read Marx properly then maybe they would not be so free with their labelling Thompson a Marxist who did not adhere to the basic tenents of Marxism espoused in the German Ideology.  Marx believed that “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. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their actual life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their natural life process.

In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, 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 set out from real, active men, and by their actual life process, we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. 

The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach, the starting point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness. This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists”.

Nina Power's chapter examines Thompson's conception of class. Thompson tended to romanticize the working class, which in turn led to his glorification of spontaneity. He admitted to having an empirical outlook. Many writers fell over themselves to praise the book. The Making of the English Working Class "was a highly influential work that contributed significantly to a revolution in the way history was studied, not only in Britain but in many countries. Instead of viewing history solely regarding kings, courtiers, aristocrats and politicians, historians began to consider the perspective of the ordinary people". "Edward Thompson's masterful The Making of the English Working Class (1963), has had an undoubtedly positive effect on historiography, the pressures of academic specialization have also led to the production of an awful lot of dross".

When you cut through the hyperbole written about Thompson's conception of class in the book, it is clear that Thompson and others were hostile to socialism is based on the working class.

As Paul Bond puts it, His "Marxism" was an ideology purpose-built to meet the requirements of the "left" petty-bourgeoisie, discontented, looking for "space," but tied by a thousand strings to the existing order".[8]

To conclude, it is tough in a short review to estimate Thompson's politics and historical preferences, let alone his place in history. He is a historian worth reading and his books will be read by future generations looking for answers to complex political and historical problems of our day. If they read his books with the understanding that he was closer to Stalinism than he was to Marxism, they will be better off for it.

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[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/P-Thompson-English-radicalism/dp/0719088216

[2] http://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/

[3] Intellectual Radicalism after 1989: Crisis and Re-orientation in the British ...

By Sebastian Berg

[4] E P Thompson: class struggle and historical materialism by D Mcnally Issue 61 of International Socialism Journal Published Winter 1993 Copyright © International Socialism

[5] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html

[6] Embittered row between UK Labour Party leader Ed Miliband and Daily Mail over his father, Ralph-by Julie Hyland 2013- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/10/08/mili-o08.html

[7] Stuart Hall Life and times of the first New Left  NLR 2010,

[8] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism by Paul Bond 5 March 2014 http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/