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.

---

[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/

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.