Up until the 1970s it was standard practice with few a dissenting historians to describe the events that took place in England between 1640 and 1660 as the English Revolution. Also a significant section of English historians grudgingly accepted that some kind of bourgeois revolution had taken place and this was reflected in a distorted way in their own work.

The historian and member of the Communist Party Historians Group , Eric Hobsbawm went so far as to correctly place the English revolution in a broader international context by saying that it was part of a general crisis of the 17th century and was one of many revolutions that took place.

It has however over the last quarter of a century has been highly fashionable to question the revolutionary nature of the civil war. In her book Ann Hughes shows that this changing historical fashion can be illustrated from the titles of two collections of sources covering early modern social history. In 1965 Lawrence Stone published Social Change and Revolution in England 1540-1640, whereas Barry Coward produced Social Change and Continuity in Early Modern England 1550-1750. The coupling of continuity rather than revolution with social changes in the latter work reveals a more qualified assessment of the extent of transformation in early modern England.

This latter more qualified approach has been taken by G E Aylmer who posed the question Rebellion or Revolution. Aylmer in his chapter on the Quality of Life states there was no shift in the economy or a radical alteration of the social structure. While he concedes that England after the 1640s and 1650s was more conducive for business development he says that this would have been the case if Charles 1”s Personal rule had continued indefinitely, or if the royalists had won the civil war.

So was there a bourgeois revolution in England. My easy answer to this question is yes but the major difficulty is proving it. Like many aspects of the history of the English Civil War whether a revolution took place has caused serious disagreements among historians. The purpose of this essay is to examine the validity of the theory of a bourgeois revolution as explained by leading Marxists and how this has been applied by two leading Marxist historians of the 20th century Christopher Hill and Brian Manning.

It is useful to begin with what the orthodox Marxist movement has written on the bourgeois nature of the English Revolution. All who have written on it agree it was bourgeois in character. This cannot be said of the considerable differences over the class nature of the Levellers. I cannot say that the English revolution produced volumes of work from the major Marxist leaders but what they did write explained in one form or another the basic premise this period witnessed a transition from a mainly feudal economy into a significant capitalist economy.

For Marx” the victory of the bourgeoisie was at that time the victory of a new social order, the victory of bourgeois property over feudal property, of nationality over provincialism, of competition over the guild, of the partition of estates over primogeniture, of the owner’s mastery of the land over the land’s mastery of its owner, of enlightenment over superstition, of the family over the family name, of industry over heroic laziness, of civil law over privileges of medieval origin.

He went on “however, it is certainly true that feudal relations were not delivered one concentrated blow. Feudalism [in England – eds.] was destroyed but disappeared only gradually. This process extended over many centuries during which certain aspects of the feudal order displayed surprising adaptability and vitality”.

Marx did not write extensively on the English Revolution but then he did not need to. He gave us a method i.e. Historical Materialism in which to examine complex historical problems such as the transition from one economic system to another, in our case the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. Although even a cursory study of the historiography of the English Revolution will tell you that this is far from an easy task. It must be said that Marx was well aware that when using the method of Historical Materialism in examining complex historical issues he made clear that it should be used as a guideline to historical research (Leitfaden or Auffassung) not a replacement for serious research. He also warned that he was not giving a theory of history, a grand philosophy of history or a master-key to history. He certainly did not advocate having a materialist outlook that was a substitute for not studying history.

In the next paragraph below Marx gives us an insight how revolutions come about and the role that individuals play in transformations such as the English Revolution

He said “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure”.

While Marx talks about the “era of Social Revolution” his method can be applied to the 17th century English bourgeois revolution. Although it has been challenged the revolution did eventually usher in a qualitive change in England’s political and economic structure. The method of examining the change from a quantitive development (the reason for Marxists heavy emphasis on long term causes of any given event) into a qualative development has long been a valuable weapon in the Marxist armoury in examining complex historical events. While this method cannot be mechanically applied to this period it does provide the user with unparalleled insight into the revolution in England.

The Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky explains Quality and Quantity: “Quality is an aspect of something by which it is what it is and not something else; quality reflects that which is stable amidst change. Quantity is an aspect of something which may change (become more or less) without the thing thereby becoming something else; quantity reflects that which is constantly changing in the world (“the more things change, the more they remain the same”). The quality of an object pertains to the whole, not one or another part of an object, since without that quality it would not be what it is, whereas an object can lose a “part” and still be what it is, minus the part. Quantity on the other hand is aspect of a thing by which it can (mentally or really) be broken up into its parts (or degrees) and be re-assembled again. Thus, if something changes in such a way that has become something of a different kind, this is a “qualitative change”, whereas a change in something by which it still the same thing, though more or less, bigger or smaller, is a “quantitative change”. In Hegel’s Logic, quantity and quality belong to Being”

How did Trotsky apply this method to the 17th century English Revolution and give more precise explanation of the revolutionary events and contending class forces contained in the explosive events.

“A study of the revolutionary era in Britain’s development, which lasted approximately from the enforced summoning of parliament by Charles Stuart until the death of Oliver Cromwell, is necessary above all in order to understand the place of parliamentarism and of ‘law’ in general in a living and not an imaginary history. The ‘great’ national historian Macaulay vulgarised the social drama of the seventeenth century by obscuring the inner struggle of forces with platitudes that are sometimes interesting but always superficial. The French conservative Guizot approaches events more profoundly. But either way, whichever account is taken, the man who knows how to read and is capable of discovering under the shadows of history real living bodies, classes and factions, will be convinced from this very experience of the English revolution how subsidiary, subordinate and qualified a role is played by law in the mechanics of social struggle and especially in a revolutionary era, that is to say, when the basic interests of the basic classes in society come to the fore. In the England of the 1640s we see a parliament based upon the most whimsical franchise, which at the same time regarded itself as the representative organ of the people”.

The next part of this essay is to examine how well historical materialism has been applied in studying the 17th century from the 20th and 21st century by two Marxist’ historians Christopher Hill and Brian Manning.

The main theme of Hill’s work was the premise that the war represented a beginning of the transition from a Feudal society to a capitalist society. For the sake of clarity (as one historian did have trouble with words feudalism and capitalism) it is worth quoting Hill “I use the word feudal in the Marxist sense, and not in the more restricted sense adopted by most academic historians to describe narrowly military and legal relations. By “feudalism” I mean a form of society in which agriculture is the basis of economy and in which political power is monopolised by a class of landowners. The mass of the population consists of dependent peasants subsisting on the produce of their family holdings. The landowners are maintained by the rent paid by the peasants, which might be in the form of food or labour, as in early days, or (by the sixteenth century) in money. In such a society there is room for small handicraft production, exchange of products, internal and overseas trade; but commerce and industry are subordinated to and plundered’ by the landowners and their State. Merchant capital can develop within feudalism without changing the mode of production; a challenge to the old ruling class and its state comes only with the development of the capitalist mode of production in industry and agriculture”.

Hill was probably the most well known of the Marxist historians to come out of the Communist Party Historians Group to adhere to the theory of the bourgeois revolution although not all around the group tried to use historical Materialism to explain the events of a revolutionary nature.

Hill asserted that profound economic and social changes took place and he states that “historians are coming more and more to recognise the decisive significance of these decades in the economic history of England. “After the civil wars,” writes Dr. Corfield, “successive governments from the Rump onwards, whatever their political complexion, gave much more attention to the interests of trade and colonial development in their foreign policies”. Restrictions which had hampered the growth of capitalist economic activity were removed, never to the restored. “The first condition of healthy industrial growth” wrote Professor Hughes apropos the salt industry, “was the exclusion of the parasitic entourage of the court”.

Right up until his death Christopher Hill had been the main proponent of the opinion that the social, economic, and political changes that took place in the civil war were the by product of a bourgeois revolution. Hill argues that the seventieth century saw a turning point in English and world history. This view of trying to understand the social processes at work in the English revolution has been fiercely attacked by numerous historians. P Lassett said “the English Revolution ought to be entombed. It is a term made out of our own social and political discourse…. It gets in the way of enquiry and understanding, if only because it requires that change of all these different types go forward at the same pace, the political pace… There never was such a set of events as the English Revolution”.

This attack on Hill is inaccurate and somewhat shallow. Hill never put forward that the events that characterised the English Civil War proceeded at the same pace. His point is that it helps to understand very complex developments if they are firstly set within the social and economic frame work. What conclusions can be drawn? Firstly through the sheer weight of empirical evidence it is clear that the war had a major impact on the social and political fabric of England. About whether this was a world turned upside down will be hotly debated for another 25 years.

In Hill’s book The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution he sought to use the method of Marxism to outline the objective basis for revolution. If the reader will bear with me I shall use two quotes firstly from the introduction “Revolutions are not made without idea, but they are not made by intellectuals. Steam is essential to driving a railway engine, but neither a locomotive nor a permanent way can be built out of steam. In this book I shall be dealing with the steam” and secondly “Marx himself did not fall into the error of thinking that men’s idea were merely a pale reflection of their economic needs, with no history of their own: but some of his successors, including many who would not call themselves Marxist, have been far more economic-determinist than Marx. It seems to me that any body of thought which plays a major in history – Luther’s, Rousseau’s, Marx’s own-takes on because it meets the needs of significant group in the society in which it comes into prominence”. Whether this group was the Gentry has been called into question. But regardless of this Hill’s point and method of arriving at his conclusions is completely lost not only by Hexter but also Hill’s modern day detractors.

Hill application of Historical materialism enabled him in the words of Ann Talbot identify “the mid-seventeenth century crisis as a revolution, which in the case of Britain overthrew the rule of one class and brought another to power. Secondly he recognised that revolutions are made by the mass of the population and that for a revolution to take place the consciousness of that mass of people must change, since revolutions are not made by a few people at the top although the character of their leadership is crucial at certain points. These achievements were considerable at the time and are of continuing relevance today, when historians increasingly reject any serious economic or social analysis and argue that revolutions are nothing but the work of a tiny group of conspirators”.

Brain Manning studied under Hill and was profoundly influenced by him. While Manning started his academic career political tied to the Labour Party later in life he was politically attached to the radical left group the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). This was a handicap that was to hamper his work for whenever the SWP review any book by the members of the Communist Party Historians Group there was and is a tendency to glorify the attachment these historians had to Marxism. This aside Manning was a serious historian and did important work in upholding what he believed was a Marxist approach to the Civil War.

In addition to his own work Manning went out of his way to praise and evaluate other historians who carried important work in examining the transition of Feudalism to Capitalism. Manning attached great importance to the work of Robert Brenner and reviewed his book for the SWP.
Manning correctly centres the first debate over whether there was a transition from Feudalism to Capitalism came about when in 1946 of Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism, was published. Manning some what generously makes the claim that the second great debate came about when Robert Brenner’s article on ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe’ in Past and Present (1976). Having only just started to read Brenner I can only comment at a later date as to the validity of this claim.

Manning is also correct when he says that like all great controversies they provide not just Marxists or for that matter Marxist historians a “framework within which to interpret the English Revolution of 1640 to 1660”

Brenner’s book largely concentrates on the role of the London merchants in the English revolution. Strangely though only in the Postscript does Brenner put his chosen subject in the context of a general understanding of the revolution.

While I would recommend Brenner’s book any reader interested in his subject matter would do well to first read Valerie Pearl 1961 book . Pearl was perhaps the first major historian to attempt a detailed look at the political allegiances of the London merchants. Having said that I do not agree with all her conclusion. Brenner in the past has pointed out that out of the largest merchants who controlled the great chartered overseas trading companies and the government of the city were royalists, while the parliamentarians were ‘merchants of the middle rank’, ‘…wealthy, but not the wealthiest men in the city…’, ‘…important traders but not directors of the chartered companies…’

While Manning is largely in favour of Brenner’s conclusions he does issue this warning “a serious problem in analysing the parties is that even among well documented groups like gentry and merchants there are substantial numbers about whom no information can be found of their allegiances in the civil war. Brenner has examined 274 of the London merchant elite, but for about half of them there is no evidence about which side they supported, and this must be borne in mind when drawing conclusions. Of 130 merchants who can be allocated to the parties, 78 were royalists, 43 were parliamentarians, and nine were side changers. Breaking these figures down, he finds that the leading merchants of the Levant and the East India companies, which controlled the city government before the revolution, were overwhelmingly royalists, while the Merchant Adventurers, who were now less dominant than they had been in the 16th century, were more evenly divided”

Brenner makes some interesting points as regards the political allegiances of some London merchants “shows that the royalist citizens were ‘the men of wealth and superior standing, the city’s traditional rulers…’ Twice as many overseas merchants were royalists as were parliamentarians. The typical parliamentarian ‘was the more modestly prosperous domestic tradesman with his own house and shop, and sometimes other city property, who was engaged in the retailing of textile and other goods’. He was a citizen of substance but ‘generally less prosperous, well-connected and powerful’ than the typical royalist. ‘It was this kind of London citizen, working with fellow militants in his parish, ward and livery company, and ready to exert a radical influence in the city’s and kingdom’s affairs, who provided much of the dynamism in the English Revolution.’

Since I have only started to read Brenner’s book I will reserve judgement on this next statement from Manning who says “It is thus now well established that the merchant elite of London–the richest and most powerful citizens–were mostly royalists in the civil war. This substantiates the Marxist thesis, as advanced by Dobb that the great merchants were tied into feudal society, their wealth and power were derived from royal and aristocratic grants and favours, and they were not agents of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.7 Brenner notes that the ability of these merchants to make a profit depended on buying cheap and selling dear, and so on their power to prevent overtrading in their markets and to restrict the number of traders, which could be achieved only by political assistance from the feudal monarchy and aristocracy in granting them monopolies, such as those of the Levant and the East India companies”
Manning then quotes Brenner from Merchants and Revolution “Far from transforming the old system economically or subverting it politically, the merchant class thus tended to live off the old socioeconomic order and to constitute one of its main bulwarks. As Marx concluded, ‘commerce imparts to production a character directed more and more towards exchange value’, nevertheless, ‘its development [and that of merchant's capital]…is incapable by itself of promoting and explaining the transition from one mode of production to another.

One warning about the book although not a weakness it must said that as Manning points out that merchants were only a part of the bourgeoisie and, there is much more work to do on identifying the revolutionary forces in the industrial districts and the relations between various elements in those districts–gentry, yeomen farmers, and merchants, landholding and landless artisans, proto-capitalists and proto-proletarians”. On this I concur.

Further Studies
From A Petit-bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party, by Leon Trotsky, December 15, 1939.

The English Revolution and the transition from feudalism to capitalism. A review of R Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change,

Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Cambridge University Press, 1993) £40
‘

Science and Society’ (Spring 1950, Fall 1952, Spring 1953, Fall 1953) reprinted with additional essays in R Hilton (ed), The Transition from

Feudalism to Capitalism (London, 197 T H Aston and C H E Philpin (eds),

The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1985).

R Brenner, ‘Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism’, in A L

Beier, D Cannadine and J M Rosenheim (eds), The First Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989) pp291-292; Merchants and Revolution, pp668-670.

C Mooers, The Making of Bourgeois Europe: Absolutism, Revolution, and the Rise of Capitalism in England, France and Germany (London, 1991), pp36-37.

The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century-Eric Hobsbawm Past and Present (1954) 33-53.

Bibliography
K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, with some notes by R. Rojas

Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War p117

G E Aylmer Rebellion or Revolution Opus 1986

C Hill in the Century of Revolution Open University Set Book 1961

The English Revolution 1640 C Hill Lawrence and Wishart 1940

Maurice Dobb Studies in the Development of Capitalism Routledge 1946

The Economy of England D C Coleman Oxford 1971

R Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp375-388.

K Lindley, ‘London’s Citizenry in the English Revolution’, in R C Richardson (ed), Town and Countryside in the English Revolution (Manchester 1992).

M Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London 1946), pp86-89,120-122,168-169.

R Brenner, ‘The Civil War Politics of London’s Merchant Community’, op cit, p65.

B Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (Bookmarks, London, 1991).

V Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1961)

R Brenner, ‘The Civil War Politics of London’s Merchant Community’, Past & Present, No 58 (1973).

The first part of this draft essay will deal with the two theories of the “general crisis of the 17th Century” and the response of historians today. The second part will place the English revolution in its broader international context more specifically events on the European continent including the beginnings of the Enlightenment influencing the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes who for me was one of the chief philosophers of the English revolution.

While I generally agree with Eric Hobsbawm’s essay the general crisis of the 17th century, it should not be treated as the last word on the subject. It is a useful as a guide to deepen our understanding to the 17th century, which contained a large number of revolutions. It is important to bear in mind one piece of advice on this subject “the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things”. While the revolutions in Europe had many differences, they also had some important similarities.

Hobsbawm’s The “general crisis” thesis like many groundbreaking essays provoked significant controversy from a number of historians who opposed the emphasis on the social and economic origins of the revolutions that were carried out throughout Europe. Also a number of historians refused to believe that there was any “general crisis” at all such as the Dutch historian Ivo Schöffer, the Danish historian Niels Steengsgaard,

Eric J. Hobsbawm’s essay, which was printed in two parts in 1954, as “The General Crisis of the European Economy in the Seventeenth Century” and “The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, II”) sought to present a Marxist analysis of the transformation from a feudal society to a capitalist one in the 17th century. This transformation was held responsible for the revolutions, wars and social unrest that took place. Hobsbawm put forward that most of the social and economic structures associated with capitalism had grown and developed during “long sixteenth century.” He believed that feudal “elements fatally obstructed growth” of capitalism He clearly believed that a revolution was needed to clear away the feudal rubbish in order for a new capitalist system to develop. The most pronounced expression of this process of was to be found in England.

Hobsbawm writes, “It will be generally agreed that the I7th century was one of social revolt both in Western and Eastern Europe. This clustering of revolutions, has led some historians to see something like a general social-revolutionary crisis in the middle of the century. France had its Frondes, which were important social movements; Catalan, Neapolitan and Portuguese revolutions marked the crisis of the Spanish Empire in the I64os; the Swiss peasant war of I653 expressed both the post-war crisis and the increasing exploitation of peasant by town, while in England revolution triumphed with portentous results. Though peasant unrest did not cease in the West – the ” stamped paper ” rising which combined middle class, maritime and peasant unrest in Bordeaux and Brittany occurred in 1675, the Camisard wars even later- those of Eastern Europe were more significant. In the i6th century there had been few revolts against the growing enserfment of peasants. The Ukrainian revolution of I648-54 may be regarded as a major servile upheaval. So must the various ” Kurucz ” movements in Hungary, their very name harking back to Dozsa’s peasant rebels of I5I4, their memory enshrined in folksongs about Rakoczy as that of the Russian revolt of I672 is in the song about Stenka Razin. A major Bohemian peasant rising in i68o opened a period of endemic serf unrest there. It would be easy to lengthen this catalogue of major social upheavals – for instance by including the revolts of the Irish in 164I and 1689”

Another exponent of the “general crisis” theory was Hugh Trevor-Roper who opposed Hobsbawm Marxist approach for a theory that sought to explain the crisis from a Court versus Country standpoint. This also provoked heated discussion. Historians such as Roland Mousnier, J. H. Elliott, Lawrence Stone, E. H. Kossmann and J. H. Hexter in papers expressed all sorts of differences with Roper. An example of the heat generated came from the Italian Marxist historian Rosario Villari, “The hypothesis of imbalance between bureaucratic expansion and the needs of the state is too vague to be plausible, and rests on inflated rhetoric, typical of a certain type of political conservative, rather than on effective analysis.” He also accused Trevor-Roper of denying the importance of English Revolution. Villari believed that “general crisis” was part of an Europe-wide revolutionary movement. Along similar lines propounded by Hobsbwm.

One writer took Ropers theory further when he explained, “The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century” instead focused on confrontations that pitted the Renaissance fiscal, political, intellectual, and moral system (“court”) against reform-minded opponents (“country”). This “crisis in the relations between society and the State” eventually spawned the Enlightenment and a range of radical, stabilizing, and indecisive political initiatives.

Roper wrote not from the standpoint of a Marxist but he agreed with Hobsbawm that in the early part of the 17th century in Western Europe there was a substantial number revolutions which led to numerous break-down of monarchies and governments the cause was “a complex series of demographic, social, religious, economic and political problems”English Civil War, the Fronde in France, the Thirty Years’ War in Germany and the disputes in the Netherlands, and revolts against the Spanish Crown in Portugal, Naples and Catalonia, were all expression of the same problems. Roper rejected the Marxist analysis of the crisis as a struggle of a rising capitalist class, which sought to replace the outmoded Feudal system.

A significant number of English based historians I have to be honest completely ignored both Hobsbawm’s and Trevor Ropers theory of the “general crisis” and have a tendency towards” compartmentalisation” history of the English Civil war. With the exception of a few works, to the contrary this tendency has increased over the last few decades. It is tempting to blame solely revisionist historians over the last thirty years but that would be wrong because even among Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill who often apologized for not putting the English revolution in a European context. In fact, Ann Talbot was strident in her views of Hill’s weakness “that he always maintains an essentially national approach to the English revolution, which he does not place in an international context. In addition, that he has a tendency to romanticise the religious movements of the period and to be too dismissive of their rational intellectual descendants such as Newton and Locke. In part, these characteristics arise from the national orientation of his social class and reflect even in Hill vestiges of the Whig outlook that imagined a peculiarly English political tradition rooted in millennial seventeenth century visionaries like Bunyan that was entirely separate from Enlightenment thought. More significantly, it reflects the influence of the popular front politics and national outlook of Stalinism. With Hill, this is evident more in what he does not write than in what he does write“.

Another writer compared the “English” approach with that of leading German historians who “rarely focus on England only“. These historians favour a comparative approach to seventeenth-century English history for example Roland Asch’s work on the European aristocracy between 1550 and 1700, and work by Wolfgang Reinhard on Power Elites and State Building. For the majority of German historians certainly since Ranke have understood “that seventeenth-century English history has to be seen in a European context“

In fact for well over three decades historiography on the English civil war or English revolution has a definite nationally centred approach. Books published in the last few years bear this out. Most recently Michael Braddick’s book title God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars, Barbara Donagan’s War in England 1642–1649 (2008). Ian Gentles (The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 1638–52 [2007]), all three books according to one writer “explicitly in its title sought to unite disparate approaches to the Englishness of the revolution and the British and Irishness of the wars as a whole“. Most of English historiography has concentrated on either regional conflicts as advocated by John Morrill or that the war was a” multiple kingdoms” conflagration. The war was solely a British affair. Other historians have concentrated on the role of religion in the Revolution but have a tendency to miss out on the role of the flood of refugees from the continent into London especially Protestants, puritans and most importantly Anabaptists who in no small way contributed especially to the growth of radical sect sects such as the Levellers and Diggers just to name two. Simply these have been a tendency to downplay to import of ideas from the continent.

In fact, if historian or writer had an interest to centre the English revolution in any sort of international context he or she would come up against a coterie of publishers opposing this.

There appears to be a marked “reluctance on the part of publishers to use any words other than a very familiar combination of English, civil and war. In addition, even he word revolution hardly ever appears now.

The problem confronting historians who write on the civil war is if they view the English revolution from a purely national standpoint or framework it becomes very difficult to see the connection between the revolution in Britain and the growth of scientific and philosophical ideas and the political, social and economic upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century Europe that played no small part in the outbreak of revolution

Most of the current English historians have a tendency to down play the wider international context and the English revolution within which the political ideas associated with this intellectual and political movement developed and have a tendency concentrate heavily on their national expression.

Not all English historians are little Englanders I must point to counter works Quentin Skinner, Martin van Gelderen and others have sought to place the English revolution in a more European centric mode although whether I agree that “scholars within the Anglo-American tradition now begin to see that the execution of Charles I was not just the starting point for the English Revolution but also the “last act of the Thirty Years War” is another matter and would be the setting for different essay.

This brings me to the second part of this essay. Thomas Hobbes I believe was very much a child of the Enlightenment and played a key role in the development of a materialist philosophy. Hobbes was a writer clearly influenced by European political and philosophical developments and they in turn influenced his philosophy it was a dialectical arrangement.

The writer Jonathan Israel has also suggested that the Fronde in France and the Masaniello rising in Naples were just as important in terms of their impact on Hobbes as the English Civil War. The international character of the English revolutionary movement was the product of processes. Which can be traced to the beginnings of the Enlightenment, which according to Israel was “the unprecedented intellectual turmoil which commenced in the mid-seventeenth century,” and was associated with the scientific advances of the early seventeenth century, especially those of Galileo. These scientific advances gave rise to “powerful new philosophical systems” producing a profound struggle between “traditional, theologically sanctioned ideas about Man, God, and the universe and secular, mechanistic conceptions which stood independently of any theological sanction.”

While Israel is no Marxist it would be advantageous to quote probably the foremost Marxist today. While David North has said, it is a matter of contention as to when it began and even what it consisted “the Enlightenment proper refers to a period of several decades in the eighteenth century, approximately from the 1710s to the 1780s. However, historical periods do not always lend themselves to such simple chronological classification. The Enlightenment, conceived of as the expression of a profound broadening of man’s intellectual horizons, must certainly be seen as the extension and outcome of the extraordinary advances in science that had, over the previous two centuries, fundamentally altered man’s conception of the universe, the place of the planet Earth in the universe, and the place and role of human beings on that planet.

“Until the early seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that the ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of life were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt the death blow to the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political structures that rested upon it, was well under way“.

He continues, “The discoveries in astronomy profoundly changed the general intellectual environment. Above all, there was a new sense of the power of thought and what it could achieve if allowed to operate without the artificial restraints of untested and unverifiable dogmas.Religion began to encounter the type of disrespect it deserved, and the gradual decline of its authority introduced a new optimism. All human misery, the Bible had taught for centuries, was the inescapable product of the Fall of Man. However, the invigorating scepticism encouraged by science in the absolute validity of the Book of Genesis led thinking people to wonder whether it was not possible for man to change the conditions of his existence and enjoy a better world. The prestige of thought was raised to new heights by the extraordinary achievements of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) who, while by no means seeking to undermine the authority of God, certainly demonstrated that the Almighty could not have accomplished his aims without the aid of extraordinarily complex mathematics“.

As was said earlier one the most important English philosopher to be influenced by continental ideas was Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Hobbes perhaps the main philosopher of the English revolution was found on the Royalist side that put forward a materialist philosophy, supported Charles 1st and was a supporter of absolute monarchy.

The Thirty Years War dominated most of his adult life, which was the bloodiest European war until the twentieth century. An estimated 30 percent of the population of what is now Germany was killed. He grew up in a world that that was truly being turned upside down. France was being ripped apart by the Fronde.In England 1640s; two civil wars consumed England, Scotland and Ireland.

The Thirty Years War certainly influenced Hobbes view of the nature of the state of in chapter 13 of Leviathan according to Ann Talbot “he describes the life of man in a state of nature as “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short.” The state of nature was the condition into which human society fell when civil society broke down. For Hobbes, the state of nature was not an abstract, theoretical construct, it was something that existed in large parts of Europe and could cause him to alter his travel plans“.

The Thirty Years War affected the area where Hobbes grew up. According to Ann Talbot “Most of the Cotswolds cloth went to London from where it was exported. The Thirty Years War produced a crisis for this trade as markets on the continent were disrupted and many clothiers went out of business. The Civil War disrupted the cloth trade even further with Malmesbury sitting uncomfortably between Royalist Oxford and Parliamentarian Bristol. What Hobsbawm described as the general crisis of the seventeenth century hit Hobbes’s hometown hard. [8] Hobbes’s view of the state reflects the unsettled conditions in which he lived. He thought the state should protect its citizens from foreign invasion and ensure civil harmony so that its citizens could go about their business in peace.”

It would be wrong however to perceive Hobbes as an isolated individual philosopher who was rejected by his contemporaries and who was without influence even during his own time. It is true that his writings came under fire precisely because they were regarded as not only dangerous but as in the introduction to the pelican version of Leviathan edited by C B Macpherson “they thought it dangerous because of the widespread acceptance it was attaining amongst the reading classes”.

One biographer asserted in 1691 that Leviathan had “corrupted half the gentry of the nation”. He was also widely read abroad especially in France where his ideas were to influence French enlightenment thinkers. Pierre Bayle in his Dictionary was to describe Hobbes as “one of the greatest minds of the Seventeenth century”. While in France Hobbes met the physician Sorbiere who did the first French translation of De Cive.

Hobbes played an important part in laying to foundation of the Enlightenment his most important work Leviathan written in 1651 was one the first study of what the early modern bourgeois state should look like. He sought to lay down a set of scientific principles on which to base that state. Hobbes was no democrat. His kind of state would be an absolute monarchy. He recognised that man had basic desires, to live and to avoid pain. Perhaps his most famous of phrases was that the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. In order to overcome this “war against all”, he put forward that men must give up their freedom to pursue any goal they wish and form some kind of compact with the state. That they accept a common power, which enforces laws. This would be government or as Hobbes wished a monarch. To many these ides were new and somewhat dangerous.

Important to Hobbes was the idea of an absolute form of authority and along with his ideas on religion faced its most criticism. Hobbes saw that at the heart of most problems in England was religion. He proposed that there would be a national religion in which the sovereign was head. Hobbes was against the Roman church and he saw all independent churches as an obstacle to his goal of a national church. According to #“G A J Rogers” Hobbes materialism everything is either body or it is nothing and his mechanical determinism soon brought a charge of atheism. Although it would be wrong to regard him as strongly religious there is, no reason to doubt his claim that he was an Anglican, albeit with Calvinist leanings. He is often regarded as sanctioning absolutism, but he would reply that all he had done was to describe the way in which societies actually work and that unless was recognised the outcome would be disorder and social disaster.

While his philosophical writings were more important that his religious leanings. Their impact was to be momentous. His thoughts and emotions were product of his environment. Ideas remained in his brain long after they had been first stimulated. According to Hobbes, words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them but they are the mony of fools. He believed that words must never be allowed to take a life of their own. The universe is corporal, body…. And that which is not body, is no part of the universe according to #Roy Porter the implications were momentous, no spirit, no lords spiritual.

It is hard to separate Hobbes political views from his philosophical ideas. He drew definite conclusions from the civil war. In many ways, he saw that the war, which ripped England apart, was very much down to the spread of ideas embodied in enthusiasm. He likened their ideas to a kind of madness that emanates when passions like vainglory or melancholy. His abhorrence of the puritans is clear from his writings particularly his Leviathan#. According to #Frederick C Beiser “the ultimate source of enthusiasm, Hobbes is convinced, is the same as that for all human actions, the desire for power. Whether he is aware of it or not the enthusiast attempts to dominate people. He claims divine inspiration to win the allegiance of a superstitious multitude: and then he promises them eternal happiness if they obey his dictates”.

It is certainly true that Thomas Hobbes’s approach to the matter was a mirror reflection of the fact that the growing English bourgeoisie still required the services of a strong monarchy. The simple reason for being capitalist social relations were not yet the dominant feature of English society “ As Marx and Engel’s put it in the Communist Manifesto, the bourgeoisie of the manufacturing period were a class that served “the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general”. [9] Men such as Thomas Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More, played that role for Henry VIII, as Nicholas Bacon was to do for Elizabeth and Francis Bacon for James I“.

It is also worth quoting the 1892 introduction to the English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific; Engels adds, “Thus Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern materialism. If Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he paid their ancestors, more’s the pity. It is none the less undeniable that Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French materialism which made the eighteenth century, in spite of all battles on land and sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French century, even before that crowning French Revolution, the results of which we outsiders, in England as well as Germany, are still trying to acclimatize.”

Hegel writing in one of his lectures said that Hobbes maintained, “The origin of all society is to be found in the mutual fear of all its members;” it is hence a phenomenon in consciousness. “Each association is thus formed in its own interest or for its own renown, that is, from selfish motives.” All such matters as security of life, property, and enjoyment, are not to be found outside it. “But men have in all dissimilarity of strength a natural similarity as well.” This Hobbes proves by a characteristic reason, viz. that “each individual can make away with the other,” each is the ultimate power over the others. “Each can be supreme. Thus their similarity is not derived from the greatest strength; it is not, as in modern times, founded on the freedom of the spirit, or on an equality of merit and independence, but on the equal weakness of mankind; each man is weak as regards others“.

He believed that psychology was the source of knowledge rather than epistemology. He was interested in the problem of sense perception and developed Galileo’s mechanical physics into an explanation of human cognition. Hobbes was certainly connected profoundly with what was to be a massive leap in political and scientific knowledge, which in a matter of decades would see the dissolution of the medieval worldview to be replaced by one based on science and reason. The previous one having given humankind somewhat limited understanding of his place in the universe.

Notes

The Scottish Revolution in its International Context,1639-1640 A Senior Honors Thesis by Leanna Packard https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/1811/36441/Leanna.Packard.pdf?sequence=1

Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism by David North 24 October 1996 www.wsws.org

CromohsVirtual Seminars : German Historians and the English Revolution: 17th and 20th Century Gaby Mahlberg University of East Anglia in M. Caricchio, G. Tarantino, eds., historiographical trends of the British Studies (17th-18th Centuries), 2006-07 http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/seminari/mahlberg_german_historians.

Hiram Morgan, review of England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-century English political instability in European context, (review no. 187) URL: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/187

AHR Forum The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century Revisited http://www.sgtbkhalsadu.ac.in/colleges/tutorial/112718122009232817.113.4.pdf

Hobbism In The Later1660s Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker

G AJ Rogers www.bbc.uk/history

Bibliography

Braddick Michael, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars, (London: Allen Lane, 2008; pp. xxvi + 758. £30).

Engels F, English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,

Hegel G. W. F. Hegel: Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Thomas Hobbes.

Israel Jonathan, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 Oxford University Press

Marx Karl, The Holy Family, p. 201 – 204

Scott Jonathan, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-century English political instability in European context Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000

Roy Porter Enlightenment Britain and the Creation of the Modern world

Leviathan Thomas Hobbes- Pelican C A B Macpherson

The Sovereign of Reason F C Beiser page 207

Quentin Skinner The Ideological context of Hobbes Political Thought

Anti Duhring Frederick Engels Foreign Language Press 1976

The publication of this work in 1972 offered sixth-form pupils and first-year undergraduates a useful overview of the origins and causes of the English Revolution from the other side of the Atlantic. Since his move to Princeton in 1963, Stone had become increasingly interested in the work of anthropologists and political scientists just as he had been in the 1940s in that of economic historians and in the light, that such work might throw on long-standing historical problems. Whatever subscription he had once paid to the influence of Marx and Tawney had long since gone by the time in the late-1950s and early-1960s that he composed The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Stone was certainly never a Marxist in the sense that Christopher Hill was. His early teaching at Princeton was, in any case, devoted, as the festschrift in his honour shows, to a survey course on the evolution of English society between c.1500 and c.1700. Stone certainly liked being at the centre of academic attention and of controversy, hence his production of works like this although it was also true to say that he had, by the early-1970s, become cut off from the main currents of academic research in England.

The origins of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s dislike of Stone did not lie in the latter storming out of a revision class at Christ Church College in Oxford. In fact, the quarrel over the gentry arose from Hugh Trevor-Roper lending his transcripts on aristocratic indebtedness from the Recognizances for Debt then held in the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane. Stone used this material without Trevor-Roper’s permission and with the most misleading of indications as to how he had acquired it in his 1948 article in The Economic History Review. Furthermore, because he had not understood the technicalities of this source, Stone had assigned to the late-Tudor peers levels of debt twice their real size. Trevor-Roper was perfectly entitled to criticise Stone’s work and, indeed, that of Tawney whose stature as an historian was considerably higher in 1950 than that of Stone but whose analytical errors were, as J.P.Cooper shortly thereafter pointed out, even more serious

The controversy probably stimulated more interesting research into English history in the seventeenth-century than any before or possibly since. Hugh Trevor-Roper was a friend of Jack Hexter until the publication of Hexter’s essay, Storm over the Gentry, in Encounter in May, 1958. For several years thereafter, their friendship was in abeyance. Politically, they were very different indeed, as anyone who knew them both would understand. There is no significance in the funding of that magazine for their historiographical positions.

The problem with Stone’s 1972 work was not just its use of sociological jargon like ‘multiple dysfunction’, ‘preconditions’, ‘precipitants’ and ‘triggers’ but also its antiquated analytical framework, its assumption that very long-term factors were at work, that the loss of landed possessions by the Crown and Church and, as he erroneously believed, the peerage made Revolution inevitable as the apparatus of Stuart rule failed to cope with the rise of the gentry, the spread of Puritanism, and the decline in the prestige of the Crown and Court and the Laudian church. Stone held that the political and religious history of the pre-Civil War period had already been written by S.R.Gardiner and C.H.Firth and fundamentally needed no emendation. He was profoundly wrong as Nicholas Tyacke and others were already demonstrating.

Stone’s work on the origins and causes of the English Revolution was dated by the time it appeared in 1972. It belonged essentially to the 1950s and early-1960s. No amount of sociological dressing could make it fashionable again. By then, Trevor-Roper had written and published his ground-breaking essay on the Union of the Crowns. It was to the hypotheses about the significance of ‘multiple kingdoms’ that the future in 1972 belonged.

The Livesey’s growing status was expressed in the fact that Michael was granted a baronetcy in 1627. Given the exalted status of the family it is on the surface perplexing to find that Michael Livesey played such a prominent part on the side of parliament and was a radical independent to boot.

Why people choose sides in the English Civil War has occupied historians of different views for centuries. In this short article I would like to offer some thoughts. Linking this question to Sir Michael Livesey is conditional on the fact that little is known about his personal views as regard why he fought against the King and in the end gleefully signed his death warrant. After all he left no diary or as far as my research has taken me no substantial statements of his intent have been found so only some general points can be made on why a layer of the gentry represented by Livesey was driven to fight on parliament’s side.

From1637 up until 1640 he was a justice of the peace. At the start of the war he became one of the most fanatical puritans in the county who gave information according to J T Pearcy’s biography “against recusants to the Long Parliament in November 1640, and was one of the ringleaders of the Kentish petition of grievances in February 1642.

This petition provoked Parliaments ire and it answered.” Mr. Peard reports the Conference concerning the Kentish Petition: The Lord Keeper delivered the Subject of the Conference in Writing; viz.”This Conference is desired concerning the Kentish Petition, upon the Informations my Lords have received, That it is yet, by the malignant and ill-affected Party, with great, though secret Industry, carried on; and not only in that County, but in some others of this Kingdom: And as it may have an ill Consequence, and a dangerous Effect, in the Disturbance of what the Parliament hath settled for the present Safety of the Kingdom, the Desire of the Lords is, That the Delinquents, and such as have been Actors in this Petition, may speedily be brought to their Trial: And that forthwith there may be a Declaration unto the Kingdom, that whosoever shall be found to further or to countenance this Petition, or any other of the like Nature, shall be held to be Disturbers of the Peace and Quiet of this Kingdom, and justly liable to the Censure of Parliament: And those that shall discover and give Information of such Practices, shall be reputed to do an acceptable Service to the King and Parliament.”Ordered, That a Message be sent to the Lords, to acquaint their Lordships, That this House doth assent to the Declaration mentioned at the last Conference; and do desire that a Committee of both Houses may be appointed to draw up one to that Purpose. (From: ‘House of Commons Journal Volume 2: 21 April 1642′, Journal of the House of Commons: volume 2: 1640-1643 (1802), pp. 535-537. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=9061

In November 1642 he was one of only two Kentish parliamentarians excluded from pardon by Charles I”.Livesey’s record in the civil war is one of contradictions. He commanded a Kentish regiment during the first civil war. He was fervent member of the county committee, and sheriff in 1643. He had a reputation for ruthlessness amongst Royalist forces but also elicited grave suspicions amongstparliamentarians

While little is known about Livesey’s thoughts his actions speak volumes. We do know he was politically an Independent MP and was on its Left wing as he was aligned closely with its radical wing. According to one writer “this was particularly clear during the counter-revolution of 1647, when he was one of the members who fled to the safety of the army in the face of Presbyterian inspired riots in Westminster in July”

Under his leadership his troops became radicalised with him so much so they were accused of disorder and plunder, and he had to be warned to keep them under control, “for fear of disaffecting the community further”. This radicalising led to his troops sanctioning Pride’s Purge in December 1648. He was so trusted by Cromwell that when it came to kill the king he served on the high court of justice to try Charles I. His signature is fifth on the death warrant. Livesey attended every day of the trial. One writer has joked that he was so eager that he was almost waiting with quill in his hand dripping with ink. The men who signed the death warrant have had a far from easy time from historians depending on their point of view historians of this subject have either taken the view of the 17th century Italian philosopher Vico and described them as Heroes or they have been described as in CV Wedgwood book, The Trial of Charles I, as“rogues and knaves”.

From what we know of Livesey it is clear he made choices and acted on those choices with a passion that is undeniable. What drove him? Unfortunately for a number of established and distinguished historians this has become an unimportant question. As far as the historian Conrad Russell is concerned there were no great causes of the civil war which drove men such as Livesey to do what they did in fact according to Russell “it is certainly easier to understand why sheer frustration might have driven Charles to fight than it has ever been to understand why the English gentry might have wanted to make a revolution against him”.

For Russell it was easier to trace long term reasons why the King would do what he did but he mysteriously denies that these same long term reasons could also explain the actions of the gentry. Russell is of that brand of revisionist who believes that the English do not really do revolutions especially nasty ones When they do he prefers the 1688 version not 1640s. I must add that I do not brand Russell a revisionist as some kind of epithet but it some respects all historians are revisionist. The use of the term in this respect is done to highlight that Russell brand of historiography was a reaction and refutation of the Marxist Historians such as Hill and ManningThis can be seen clearly in this next quote in which Russell was seeking to dispel the Marxists insistence of long term causes of the Revolution.

“If we were to search the period for long-term reasons why the King might have wanted to fight a Civil War, we would find the task far easier than it has ever been to find long-term causes why the gentry might have wanted to fight a Civil War.” Why, then, has the task never been attempted? The trouble, I think, comes from our reliance on the concept of ‘revolution.’ Revolutions are thought of as things done to the head of state and not by him. The result is that Charles has been treated as if he were largely passive in the drift to Civil War, as a man who reacted to what others did, rather than doing much to set the pace himself. This picture is definitely incorrect. Whether the notion of an ‘English Revolution’ is also incorrect is a question I will not discuss here. Anyone who is determined to find an ‘English Revolution’ should not be looking here, but later on, in the years 1647-1653, and those years are outside the scope of this article. This article is concerned with the outbreak of Civil War, an event in which the King was a very active participant”.

At this point I should point out that although members of the gentry like Livesey did take part in a revolution despite Russell’s protestations it would be wrong to say that they did so as a tightly discipline unit similar to Bolsheviks during the Russian revolution. The 17th century revolution was a not a chemically pure revolution. And one caricature of Marxism has been to present Marxists as presenting so. It is clear that the gentry were split into all sorts of camps and fought for all kinds of political, social, and economic. religious and localized reasons.

But the beauty of this period is that identifiable class relations were becoming more definable and parties and political allegiances became somewhat clearly into view. According to a 20th century Russian revolutionary speaking on 17th century revolutionary politics “The adherents of the Episcopal or Anglican, semi-Catholic Church were the party of the court, the nobility and of course the higher clergy. The Presbyterians were the party of the bourgeoisie, the party of wealth and enlightenment. The Independents and the Puritans especially, were the party of the petty bourgeoisie, the plebeians. Wrapped up in ecclesiastical controversies, in the form of a struggle over the religious structure of the church, there took place a social self-determination of classes and their re-grouping along new, bourgeois lines. Politically the Presbyterian party stood for a limited monarchy; the Independents, who then were called “root and branch men” or, in the language of our day, radicals, stood for a republic. The half-way position of the Presbyterians fully, corresponded to the contradictory interests of the bourgeoisie – between the nobility and the plebeians. The Independents” party which dared to carry its ideas and slogans through to their conclusion naturally displaced the Presbyterians among the awakening petty-bourgeois masses in the towns and the countryside that formed the main force of the revolution”.

One last point a number of historian perhaps the most famous of which are A Everitt and John Morrill have sought to explain the behaviour of members of the Gentry such as Sir Michael Livesey from the standpoint of local politics or religion. Morrill’s most famous work The Revolt of the Provinces to a certain extent sums this school of History up.

In an interview with Morrill he describes how he developed his provincial view of the Civil War “I think it was in 1973 in Oxford when I was a young research fellow that I gave a series of lectures called ‘Some Unfashionable Thoughts on English 17th-century History’, and these were extraordinarily crude and unsophisticated revisionism avant la lettre. But I’m not claiming I’m the progenitor – I’m saying there were a lot of people trying to work out a new position who were dissatisfied with the existing position. I’ve no doubt at all that Lawrence Stone’s Causes of the English Revolution (1972) was the thing people reacted against, with its rather triumphalist claim that you could now produce a kind of social determinist view of the long-term causes and origins of the English revolution. It was that I think, which a number of people quite independently reacted against”.

Having only picked up Morrill book recently I cannot comment on his particular type of historiography. I am not against local studies of the revolution. In many ways it is useful in explaining the actions of people like Livesey but I believe this type of study can only take you so far. There were local issues that impacted heavily of why people fought and who they fought for. But I believe that this type of study must be done in conjuncture with an understanding of the long term causes of the war and have a deep understanding of the way socio economic changes move men and women or as Marx said it “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”.

Sources

J.T. Peacey, Sir Michael Livesay , Oxford DNB, 2004

A. Everitt, The community of Kent and the great rebellion, 1640–60 (1966)

House of Commons Journal Volume 2: 21 April 1642′, Journal of the House of Commons: volume 2: 1640-1643 (1802), pp. 535-537. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=9061 Date accessed: 01 June 2011).

Why did Charles I fight the Civil War? Conrad Russell .History Today 1999

The Independents in the English Civil War Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com

Professor John Morrill interview Transcript interview took place in Selwyn College, Cambridge, and 26 March 2008.

Alison Stuart Regicide and Family Legend http://hoydensandfirebrands.blogspot.com/2009/01/regicide-and-family-legend.html

Bibliography

On the origin of the Kentish rising see Matthew Carter’s A true relation of the Honourable though unfortunate expedition of Kent, Essex, and Colchester.

Chapter 11 of The History of the Russian Revolution (1931) Leon Trotsky

Appendix A

Sir Michael Livesey to Sir Anthony Weldon. ] – Sir William Clarke, The Clarke Papers. Selections from the Papers of William Clarke, vol. 2 [1894

Sir,

Wee are glad your parts are soe quiett. Itt is otherwise with other parts of the County; Rochester, Sittingburne, Feversham, and Sandwich all garrison’d for the Kinge. The County Magazines in those places, and as wee just now heard . . . . likewise seized, Mr. Box their prisoner att Sittingburne, and one John Swan though of their owne partie, and by themselves . . . What our indeavours are and present engagements wee shall att large acquaint you with att your coming, which we daily expect. In the meane time resting,

Your humble servant

Michael Livesey. Aylesford, 22 May. 1648,

Appendix B

A contemporary list of radical members at the time of Pride’s Purge The following list is from a little-known but important pamphlet published a few days after Pride’s Purge, giving a list of those regarded by its author(s) as the real radicals of Parliament. It appears to be reasonably accurate, as it omits the more conservative independents, such as Armine and those known to have been absent at the time, such as St John, Whitelocke, Vane, etc.

A Remonstrance and Declaration of several Counties, Cities and Boroughs

against the Unfaithfulness and late unwarrantable Proceedings of Some of their

Knights, Citizens and Burgesses in Parliament. We the knights etc. neither gave nor intended to give to

Henry Marten Thomas Harrison Wm. Lenthall ( Speaker)

Hairy Smith Francis Rous Lord William Monson

John Hutchinson Gregory Clement Philip Lord Lisle

Humphrey Edwards Augustine Skinner Robert Blake

Humphrey Salway Sir Gilbert Pickering William Cowley

Thomas Purey Sir James Harrington Henry Ireton

Isaac Pennington Edmund Ludlow Sir Edward Bainton

John Lisle William Edwards Philip Smith

Michael Oldsworth Nicholas Love Peregrine Pelham

Thomas Scott Thomas Atkins Thomas Challoner

Edmund Dunch Luke Hodges Brian Stapleton

Nicholas Gold Sir William Allanson William Hay

Valentine Walton Cornelius Holland Oliver Cromwell

Henry Herbert John Carew Denis Bond

Thomas Waite Benjamin Valentine John Fry

Anthony Stapley Francis Allen Sir Michael Livesey

John Jones Lawrence Whitacre Peter Temple

John Lenthall Roger Hill Miles Corbet

John Venn Sir Henry Mildmay George Thomson

Richard Aldworth Thomas Lord Grey Sir Peter Wentworth

John Dure

John Moore John Gurdon

____________________

It is fair to say that up until some members of the Communist Party Historians Group namely Christopher Hill and a few others started to rescue them from historical oblivion the Levellers have had a pretty raw deal from historians.

A collective responsibility for the dearth major works of note up until the early part of the 20th century is largely the fault of Whig Historians. Large numbers of these historians in the words of Hill had a tendency to ‘bury their head in the sand’ as regards the Levellers.

Current historiography has certainly carried over much of the worst traits of Whig attitudes towards the Levellers. Some have ignored them completely such as John Adamson others have portrayed them as having little or no influence on the outcome of the war. John Morrill mentioned them twice in his book The Revolt of the Provinces.

While it is difficult to generalise as regards current historians views on the Levellers and not all current writing on the Levellers are by conservative historians some points can be made.

The Conservative orientated revisionist’s downplaying of the significance of the Levellers was really a by product of their assault on Marxist historiography. Before I go any further one point I must make is that I am not against historians revising previous work on the English revolution. As one writer recently put it all historians especially good ones are revisionists, he states “I continue to believe that revisionism is absolutely essential to the study of history. In fact, there would be no history without it. In his book Who Owns History?, Columbia University history professor Eric Foner recalls a conversation with a Newsweek reporter who asked him, “When did historians stop relating facts and start all this revising of interpretations of the past?” Foner responded: “Around the time of Thucydides.” (1)

Modern revisionist historians who wrote on the Civil war period first appeared in the early 70s. John Morrill in an interview describes how a new revisionist outlook on the civil war came into being

“Well I think the interesting thing about revisionism was how a whole series of people came to the same conclusions simultaneously without really knowing one another. I hadn’t met Mark Kishlansky or Conrad Russell or Kevin Sharpe when we all published our 1976 works which were the initial canon of revisionism, and that’s one of the most interesting things. It’s also worth saying that almost all the revisionists were people who’d studied in Oxford and then been made to leave, for whom jobs couldn’t be found in Oxford. We reacted to some extent against a previous generation of Oxford-trained historians like Stone and Hugh Trevor-Roper and Hill. So it was a curiously Oxford-dominated thing both in what was being reacted against and in the reaction itself. I think it was in 1973 in Oxford when I was a young research fellow that I gave a series of lectures called ‘Some Unfashionable Thoughts on English 17th-century History’, and these were extraordinarily crude and unsophisticated revisionism avant la lettre. But I’m not claiming I’m the progenitor – I’m saying there were a lot of people trying to work out a new position who were dissatisfied with the existing position. I’ve no doubt at all that Lawrence Stone’s Causes of the English Revolution (1972) was the thing people reacted against, with its rather triumphalist claim that you could now produce a kind of social determinist view of the long-term causes and origins of the English revolution. It was that I think which a number of people quite independently reacted against”. (2)

Social or economic determinist views on history are of course associated with a Marxist view of historical development. Morrill alongside others sought to revise previous historiography’s that were based on Marxist methodology. One such tenant of Marxism was the use of historical materialism in order to explain historical processes and events.

The revisionist attack on historical materialism took many forms. Holstun makes the point that when revisionists talk or address the question of class, “working people” or the historians who examine class issues through the school of historical thoughts called “history from below” their questions and their answers are usually only half answered and they try their best to stop any deeper understanding of class relations during the war.

Another point is that it would be wrong to define the group as a card carrying set of historians who met every Monday to work out new revisions or new attacks on Marxism. Each historian should be measured on their merits and what they wrote and said. It would also be fruitful to examine certain parts of their work from the standpoint of whether they brought a new insight into as regards the Levellers or whether they sought to impose a more conservative historiography on studies of the Levellers.

It would be good to start with perhaps the most outspoken representative of the revisionist hostility to the Levellers Mark Kishlansky. His philosophy towards the Levellers could be summed up best with his famous quote “The war created radicalism; radicalism did not create the war”. On the surface this can seem an accurate assessment of the Levellers. It is true that the immeadite causes of any revolution are “a change in the state of mind of conflicting classes and changes in the collective conscoiousness by groups such as the Levellers which had a semi concealed thing about them. These changes in thinking mostly reveal themselves sharpley when events such as a revolution occur. In these times they break through to the surface with a intensity not seen in peaceful times.

Undoubtedley these groups were radicalised by the war and gained support from soldiers and civillians who became disillusioned with the way things turned out. What Kishlansky leaves out are that these ideas were a reflection in the minds of men and women of powerful economic and social changes that were developing at least in the proceading decades or according to some Lawrence Stone a centruy before.

Kishlansky concedes that the Levellers were a radical outfit but argues they had limited or no influence inside the New Model Army and certainly made no major difference to the radicalisation of the army. What radicalisms did occurred was for Kishlansky because of arrears over pay and conditions. He also states that the army was not radicalised before 1647. This view is common amongst other revisionist historians and writers take for instance this quote from Jason Eldred who is largely an apologist for Kishlansky views in his essay An Army So Provoked. (3)

“The New Model Army’s intrusion into politics was not as unavoidable as its historiography has made it seem. Mark Kishlansky’s enormously influential Rise of the New Model Army was the first major work on the New Model in nearly a century and stood generations of accepted belief about the New Model on their heads, arguing that the Army was not an intrinsically radical organization bent on radical ends from its inception. Few historians would now challenge Kishlansky’s thesis, although, as always in the historiography of England in the 1640s, there is room for plenty of debate. The Army could have been politicized or radicalized before the spring of 1647, but if it was, then neither the soldiers nor their officers left any indication of that nascent radicalism in print. Quite simply, the New Model’s politicization was provoked in the spring and summer and kept red hot by the actions of the House of Commons. Several factors triggered the Army’s entry into politics: their material, legal, and civil concerns, and the House of Commons’ concomitant total disregard for those concerns”.

Kishlansky questioned the level of Leveller involvement citing the fact that the dispute in army was largely over pay. This statement can be easily disproved if one examines the debates that took place at Saffron Walden. The debates showed that it was not just a matter of pay but there was the first indication of political demands and more significantly soldiers were showing a level of political independence through the setting up of spokesman for their cause in the form of agitators. The growing Leveller influence in the army can be detected in the statement that the soldiers saw that their “liberties as Englishmen are 10,000 times more important than our arrears of pay”. Kishlansky counters by saying that Leveller rhetoric was fundamentally opposed to a standing army and that Lillburne’s own experience made him suspicious and out of touch with its rank and file, while Kishlansky suggested that the dynamics of army relations with parliament could be explained adequately in terms of the army’s own sense of its honour, its legitimate demands as an army, and its own experience in war and peace’.

Of course the statement by Kishlansky is true in so much that an army did have its own characteristics and demands but what is lacking in his argument is any understanding that the army was made up of people of different social and political backgrounds and they represented definite social and politics classes. These people fought out their ideas inside the army. The army itself was not above politics. The Levellers understood this and in a limited way so did Cromwell who knew that who controlled the army controlled power

While Kishlansky admits that the army was full of politics, it was driven not by the movement of people fighting for their politics. His somewhat crass view that the army was moved not by ‘Lillburne’s rhetoric’ but by the ‘shedding of blood’

Kishlansky rejects this attitude and presents a somewhat one-sided view of the political struggles inside the army.

He dismisses the struggle was over ideology when he says ‘Much has been written about the ideology of the army, but most of it misconceived. A principle reason for this has been historians have assumed that the lowly social origins of many of the officers created a commitment to radical ideology. This is false on both factual and logical grounds. There were men of low birth among the new Model’s officers, and much has been made of Pride the drayman and Hewson the cobbler more still might be made of obscure officers like Spongers and Creamer whose surnames suggest backgrounds in trades and service. The army also contained a Cecil, a Sheffield, and three colonels who were knights. Yet careful study of the armies social origin, which lends support to the view that they were more traditional in nature (of solid status in rural and urban structures) still does not meet the real objections to existing interpretation- the fallacy of social determinism”.

Kishlansky is therefore hostile to any historical sources that seek to detect the social undercurrents that moved people of different social backgrounds into fight against the king and against parliament as the Levellers did.

From the 1640s onwards the Levellers advocated new and revolutionary ideas but as any person who studies this period they took the form of a “curious and archaic guise”. The Levellers who were the true ideologists of the revolution used the bible to find historical precedent to explain and justify what they were doing.

The left wing American historian Jim Holstun described Conrad Russell’s work as a ‘manifesto for historical revisionism’, he makes the point that Russell sought another way to explain the social changes that were taken place in the English revolution that historians should concentrate on the upper yeomanry, the middling sort of people who were rising according to Russell ‘not so much at the expense of the gentry, as at the expense of small holders and the labouring poor’.

Russell would often make the point that he not conversant with the term’s feudalism and capitalism. In many senses these revisionist views are not new in 1926 R H Tawney was highly scathing of historians and writers who rejected social change explanations for revolutionary events, he said ‘After more than half a century of work on (capitalism)… by scholars of half a dozen different nationalities and of every variety of political opinion, to deny that the phenomenon exists’ or to suggest that if it does exist, it is unique among human institutions in having, like Melchizedek, existed from eternity, or to imply that, if it has a history, propriety forbids that history to be disinterred, is to run wilfully in blinkers … (An author) … is unlikely, however, to make much of the history of Europe during the last three centuries if, in addition to eschewing the word, he ignores the fact.’

Christopher Hill argues that Russell had a tendency like Kishlansky to say that the civil war occurred due to a series of accidents, which were the consequences of the personal peculiarities of powerful individuals. He still takes too short-sighted a view of the social and economic causes and consequences of the greatest revolution in our history. (4)

Austin Woolrych has a similar position on the Putney debates as Russell he correctly states that, the Putney Debates of 1647 were regarded as a chapter in the history of the Levellers he rejects that Putney was an essentially a battle between contending social forces. With Cromwell representing the Grandees and the Levellers representing the petty trades and artisans.

Woolwich somewhat contentiously states that the army had “refrained from political activity despite the tendency of the Presbyterians both religious and political to portray it as a hotbed of sectaries and radicals”. If this is true then did Putney really drop from the skies? Is there no connection between the activity of the army before Putney and during? Is history just a series of unconnected episodes?

Woolrych’s books are worth reading not so much for his analysis but for the tremendous use of empirical material. In fact it would be correct to say that a number of revisionist historians who have at least attempted to address the Levellers have done so with a disdain for the theoretical nature of a lot of Leveller writings.

In one passage, Woolrych again tries to separate the debate at Putney from the general discussion within the army and outside it. ‘Anyone who strains to hear the voice of the soldiery in the Putney debates should be aware that, apart from one brief interjection by an unnamed agent, the only troopers who spoke that day were Sex by and Everard, and on the other two days recorded by Clarke the only others who opened their mouths were Lockyer and Allen. No agitator of a foot regiment is known to have spoken. Out of just fifty officer-agitators listed in October, twelve spoke in the course of the three-recorded days five of them only once, and very briefly. We should be very cautious about treating the Putney debates, wonderful as they are as the typical voice of the army’.

While it is true that the ordinary soldiers were thin on the ground, even a cursory look at who was at Putney would give a much clearer picture as to the significance of these individuals. Wooldrych mentions Edward Sexby, who at the time was a colonel in the New Model Army. Sexby who came up through the ranks and began life from a lowly position. Sexby spoke not for himself but for the rank and file soldiers who he said were as poor as him and had risked their lives for their ‘birthright and privileges as Englishmen’ only to be told by Ireton that unless they had a fixed estate they had no birth right, he then vented his frustration ‘we sought to satisfy all men, and its was well’ but in going (about) to doe it we have dissatisfied all men. Wee have laboured to please a Kinge, and I think and I think, except we goe about to cutt all out throats, we shall nott please him, and we have gone to support and housewh. Will prove roten studs, I meane the parliament which consists of a company of rotten members’.

Even Woolrych is forced to describe incidents where ‘open incitements to mutiny were already bearing poisoned fruit. Fairfax had ordered Colonel Robert Lillburne’s foot regiment to Newcastle, for sound military reasons, but a party of new agent bearing copies of The Case of the Armies overtook it and urged it not to let the army be divided. Thereupon its soldiers turned back, held an unauthorised rendezvous and refused to obey their officers. Other regiments were in a state of incipient mutiny before the debates at Putney were wound up’.

The first thing I would like to say about John Morrill is that he is a generous historian who is willing to pass comment and give his time to other historians. He as can be seen above was perhaps the first historian to notice that the new revisionist historiography sought not only to attack Marxist writings but also Whig interpretations of the civil war. Morrill’s attempt to replace Marxist historiography as the dominant force in civil war studies was to reject social, economic explanations and to resort to ‘local studies’. As Kevin Sharpe explained “the key to English political thought was not theory but circumstance, practical politics rather than philosophy. Morrill downplayed the use of “larger economic explanations” as “less important as family and upbringing

What was the place of the Levellers in the English revolution? The Levellers appeared to take on many of the characteristics of a political party in the years 1645-46. This is a contentious issue and has been disputed. They were the radical wing of the Independent coalition and were responsible for many of modern day political techniques such as mass demonstrations, collecting petitions, leafleting and the lobby of MPs. As an aside William Clarke who provided us with the report of the Putney Debates was an avid collector of books, pamphlets and leaflets found in his collection was over eighty Leveller pamphlets. The Levellers strength mainly lay in London and other towns and had significant support in the army.

The main plank of its manifesto was the call for a democratic republic in which the House of Commons would be more important than the House of Lords. A Leveller would have a wanted redistribution and extension of the franchise, legal and economic reform on behalf of men of small property, artisans, yeoman, small merchants, and the very layers, which made up the composition of the Levellers themselves.

Some historians such as Alan G. Smith have a mistakenly put forward suggestions that the Levellers were proponents of’ social revolution’. Certainly, in recent studies communist ideas have been attributable to them by the very same people who have tended to exaggerate the revolutionary potential of the Levellers. As we will see later, this was not just attributable to later day historians but by the some participants of the civil war themselves.

The Levellers themselves were part of a group of men that sought to understand the profound political and social changes that were taking place at the beginning of the 17th century. They were the true ‘Ideologues of the revolution’ and had a capacity for abstract thought. Levellers also wished to democratise the gilds and the City of London, a decentralisation of justice and the election of local governors and stability of tenure for copyholders. While the Levellers were sympathetic to the poor, this stemmed from their religion they had no programme to bring about social change; they never advocated a violent overturning of society. Their class outlook, that being of small producers, conditioned their ideology. At no stage did the Levellers constitute a mass movement.

The contradiction between their concern for the poor and their position of representatives of the small property owners caused some tension. They had no opposition to private property and therefore they accepted that inequalities would always exist, they merely argued for the lot of the poor to be made more equitable. One of their members John Cooke explained “I am no advocate for the poore further then to provide bread and necessaries for them, without which, life cannot be maintained, let rich men feast, and the poore make hard meale, but let them have bread sufficient”.

Knowing that they could not come to power through the presently constituted electorate the Levellers attempted to find constitutional ways of getting round it. A draft constitution produced in 1647 called the Agreement of the People declared that the state had broken down in civil war and must be refounded on the basis of certain fundamental “native rights” safeguarded even from a sovereign went against one of the most fundamental reasons for the war in the first place. The Agreement amongst other demands, called for biennial parliaments, franchise reform, only those who contracted into the new state by accepting the agreement were to have the vote.

The one chance the Levellers had to put their ideas into practice was to gain control of the army. The development of the new model army was central to the outcome of the English civil war, who controlled the army controlled state power. The Levellers had agitated for the arrears of wages to be paid and that indemnity for actions committed during the civil war is granted. This agitation had won them considerable support in the army.

At the Army Council debate at Putney held in the October/November of1647 came the Levellers opportunity. The limitations of the Leveller program was cruelly exposed in a very famous exchange between Colonel Rainsborough, leader of the Levellers in Parliament and Henry Ireton, Rainsborough stated that “The poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he and therefore every man that is to live under a government ought, first, by his own consent. To put himself under the government”.

This seemed all very democratic but ‘free born Englishmen’ excluded servants and the poorer sections that did not constitute ‘the people’. Christopher Hill says, “The Leveller conception of free Englishmen was thus restricted, even if much wider, than the embodied in the existing franchise. Their proposals would perhaps have doubled the number of men entitled to vote. However, manhood suffrage would have quadrupled it. The generals, generally horrified, pretended at Putney that the Levellers were more democratic than they were”.

To put it more simply the generals deliberately exaggerated the radicalism of a majority of the Levellers in order to label them extremists and to mobilise their own supporters against them. Cromwell correctly recognised that if the franchise was widened it would threaten his position in parliament. Again, Hill explains, “Defending the existing franchise Cromwell son in law, Henry Ireton rejected the doctrine ‘that by a man being born here, he shall have a share in that power that shall dispose of the lands here and of all things here’. The vote was rightly restricted to those who ‘had a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom’. Namely, ‘the person in whom all lands lies and that incorporation’s in whom all trading lies”

Ireton claimed the present House of Commons represented them and went on to ask by what right the vote was demanded for all free Englishmen. If by natural right, taking up the Levellers point that they should be free. Who could freely dispose of their own labour? Then Ireton could see no reason why men had as much natural right to property as to the vote. He went on to point out that if you give them the vote, then they will be the majority in parliament and they will give equal property rights to everybody. This argument completely confused Rainsborough and undermined his argument.

Cromwell was acutely aware that the ideas of the Levellers and the smaller groups within them such as the Diggers were becoming a dangerous business. Cromwell said of what he called the ‘lunaticks’ “You must break these men or they will break you” Cromwell declared. By May 1649, the Levellers had been defeated in battle and their influence in the army and in civilian life disappeared.

In many respects, the true revolutionary of the civil war were Cromwell and his New Model Army. While not agreeing with the revisionists that the Levellers were an insignificant movement, they should not also be hyped into something they were not. They were essentially a movement of the lower middle class that sought to extend the franchise on a limited basis. The reason this failed was that the social and economic basis for their ideas had not yet developed in this sense their egalitarian ideas were a foretaste of future social movements, not communistic but more in the tradition of social democracy.

Sources

(1) All Historians are Revisionists by John Fea wardworldhistory.blogspot.com/2011/05/all-historians-are-revisionists.html

(2) Professor John Morrill interview transcript at Selwyn College, 26 March 2008 www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/interviews/Morrill_John.html

(3) An Army So Provoked Popular Print and the Language of Radicalisation in the New Model Army Jason Eldred University of Virginia

(4) The bashed-up revolution: Christopher Hill responds to last week’s article by Conrad Russell marking the 350th anniversary of the start of the English Civil War Thursday, 27 August 1992 .

(5) Radicalism and Revisionism in the English Revolution Geoff Kennedy 2007 Verso

Bibliography

Holstun Jim Ehud’s Dagger Class struggle in the English revolution Verso 2000

Morrill John The Revolt of the Provinces

Russell Conrad The Crisis of Parliaments 1603-1660 (1971)

Russell Conrad The Causes of the English Civil War (1990)

Russell Conrad The fall of the British Monarchies.

I first met him in 1999 at Birkbeck University. I was attending an open evening because I was thinking of doing a part time degree and Birkbeck had been recommended to me by a friend. At the open meeting was Barry Coward. Part of the attraction of the degree was the study of the English revolution. I had a vague likening for the subject but when I asked Barry about the course, he immediately fired my enthusiasm and signed up a week later. This was probably one of my better decisions

The first thing that struck me about Barry Coward was his incredible and infectious enthusiasm for his chosen topic. He was also something rare amongst most historians in that he was always warm and friendly towards his students.

In his own words “I never ceased to be amazed by their ability to combine full-time employment with part-time study and gain degrees as good as, and often better than, those who studied full time. It was enormously rewarding to watch Birkbeck students – especially those who had not done formal study for some time – develop academically, and then use Birkbeck as a launch pad for life-changing experiences. I’d like to thank them for their enthusiasm and the freshness of their ideas that I drew on in my writings.’

Barry Coward was rare bread. He was both a serious historian but he was also a first class teacher. John Croxon who was one of Barry’s students who spoke at the memorial testified to Barry’s special talent as a teacher. John’s experience echoed my own and many other students in the fact that Barry always had time and patience for students no matter how small their questions.

While listening to the speakers you got a great sense of Barry’s modesty. This may of stemmed from the fact that he had a formidable knowledge of his subject so much so that a number of his books such as the The Stuart Age, England 1603–1714 (latest edition 2003)The Cromwellian Protectorate (2002) are standard texts on the subject of the English Civil war. Fellow historian Ian Roy spoke of Barry’s work. I tend to agree with him as regards probably Barry’s most important work certainly because of its value for research purposes was his English Historical Documents, 1603-1660: which edited alongside Peter Gaunt.

His book on Oliver Cromwell (1991) has also become a standard textbook on the period. This was not an orthodox biography. He kept an open mind on major issues surrounding Cromwell. He made an important point of saying that it is good to strip away the myths surrounding Cromwell. Many of these myths and falsehoods were spread by hostile biographers.

As the title says, Barry was a partisan Historian. He was a former president of the Cromwell Association. While he wore his history on his sleeve, he did so to further our understanding of not only Cromwell but also his place in the English revolution.

Coward was not a materialist historian. While not a revisionist historian, he accepted the way history of this period is now written without any attention to underlying socio-economic causes of events portrayed in the book. However Coward did conceed that the differences which arose amongst parliamentarians were political rather than religious. The main cause of disagreement was over what to do with the king. What was the class basis of the differences between the Independents and Presbyterians?

He makes an outstanding claim that the New Model Army was not political from the outset and that it was not politicised by the Levellers, which I don to agree with. Coward says the army spontaneously gravitated to radical solutions over pay grievances etc. This downplaying of the ideological debates that took place in the army is a major weak point in the book. That is not to say that Coward had no grand narrative, which was his fascination with Cromwell’s attempt at a “Godly Reformation” . Again the weakness in this book is the absence of any class analysis. What social forces were moving not just Cromwell but other players?

Barry was a good public speaker although not the best he was not the worse. He also had one of the best traits of a historian in that during his lectures you could almost sense that when he was speaking on subject he was already rethinking his remarks.

It would be remiss of me to say that I did not always see eye to eye on his political and historical conclusions on the Civil War. We came from different political family trees. He was old school labour and I was certainly to the left of him but must say that during his seminars which was probably the best part of my degree we had a frank exchange and that was it. Having said this he was always, the gentlemen and these debates never became bitter or rancorous.

In conclusion while Barry never subscribed to the Marxist method of studying historical events I am sure he would not mind me quoting Karl Marx to highlight Barry’s attitude to study. In the 1872 Preface to the French edition of Das Kapital Vol. 1, Marx emphasised that “There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits”. Reaching a scientific understanding was hard work. Conscientious, painstaking research was required, instead of philosophical speculation and unwarranted, sweeping generalisations. Suffice to say Barry made it to that luminous summit. I will miss Barry and so will past and future students of 17th century England.

While researching in my local library I came across Plowden’s book In a free Republic and have now just finished it so I will write some brief thoughts on it. Firstly while looking on the internet to find something on her I found to my dismay that she died in 2007. This fact took me by surprise but I freely admit apart from the year of my degree I have only properly studied this subject for two years, but does it strike me that there seems to be a written rule that more you learn about the civil the less you actually know.

To get onto the subject of her book I enjoyed reading it and Plowden does write in an interesting and thoughtful way. She once described herself as being “in the fortunate position of having been able to turn my hobby into a profession”. “There must be thousands of women doing unsatisfying jobs who have a private interest or talent which could be turned to full-time and financial advantage… I do wish more of them would have a go.”

The book is well researched and she makes good use of primary sources such as diaries of some leading figures of the revolution. Her books are extremely popular, leading one writer to say on one of her books on the Elizabethan period “Where Alison Plowden excels, is in shrewdly stressing how Elizabeth appreciated the dangers of sexual desire; the general reader will find it wholly informative and very entertaining.” However she does appear to rely heavily on conservatives figures of the revolution and especially there appears to be an over reliance on the diary of John Evelyn.

Ploweden’s background as a writer is interesting she came to write academic history from a background as a writer in television and a very successful one at that. She mainly concentrated on the Tudor and Stuart periods. In her career she wrote 25 books, including The Elizabethan Quartet, a four-volume study of Elizabeth I. Her life appears as fascinating as the subjects she chose to write about. In her obituary in the Times of London it said of her “through her father, Miles Plowden, she was a descendant of the Elizabethan jurist Edmund Plowden, of whom it was said there was “no man more worthy to be remembered as singularly well learned in the Common Laws of England”.

She seems to have been well liked amongst her profession with historian and journalist Paul Johnson saying of her Quartet of books on Elizabethan England “writes with verve, brevity and often wit; a most entertaining book which at the same time is accurate and judicious”.

Plowden wrote a number of books on the civil war, The Stuart Princesses, which looked at the lives of the six princesses of the House of Stuart. She followed up with the book I intend to review at a later date Women All on Fire. This is a brave book in many ways. It cannot have been easy writing such a study in what is a very male dominated subject in fact what period of history isn’t. It is a valuable study of the women who played an important political and social on both sides of the Civil War. One entire chapter was devoted to Queen Henrietta Maria.

While she had every right to write a book which largely stems from a conservative and bordering of royalist historiography In a Free Republic – Life in Cromwell’s England, does tend to be heavily critical of Cromwell’s Republic. While it has been portrayed as looking at the reality of life in Cromwell’s England it tends to be a little one sided. In fact it’s not so much what she writes it is what she chooses to leave out. But having said that she is worth reading.

— attributed to William Walwyn

As F D Dow says in the preface, his little book is not a narrative of the events of the English civil war. However he does in such a small book give a good introduction to the level of radicalism in the English Revolution. It is clear that outside of the Russian and French revolutions respectively no other revolution has generated such heat historically speaking.

He begins his book with an assessment of current historiography on the subject of the radical groups in the Civil war. The reader should keep in mind that the book was written and published in 1985 when Dow wrote this book the revisionists had already had been going for well over ten years.

The first chapter is well written and informative. He outlines the attack on Marxist historiography especially any understanding of the importance of any long term causes of the English civil war. As Dow suggests even the use of the term radical to describe groups such as the Levellers has come under attack, according to Glenn Burgess “Conal Condren and Jonathan Clark to name two have said that the term ‘radicalism’ should not be applied to phenomena that exist before the term itself was coined. Clark has pointed out that it applies “to a doctrine newly coined in England in the 1820s to describe a fusion of universal suffrage, Ricardian economics and programmatic atheism. To speak of an eighteenth – or a seventeenth-century radicalism is therefore as much of a solecism as to speak of an eighteenth- or a seventeenth-century fascism or Marxism”.

One by product of this turn away from Marxist historiography (that was perhaps best expressed in the writings of Christopher Hill, Brian Manning and the early work of Lawrence Stone) was the increase in number of local studies. Studies such as The County Committee of Kent in the Civil War by A M Everitt and more famously John Morrill’s work on the Revolt of the Provinces emphasised short term explanations. The rise of local studies does not necessary mean that these historians had a right wing agenda. David Underdown Riot, Rebel and Rebellion is well worth a look at. On the whole local studies are a worthwhile thing but note should be taken as E H Carr suggests to study the historian before you study the history.

Other revisionists such as John Adamson limited the civil war to a struggle amongst the nobility not a class struggle in his Noble Revolt and his forth coming Noble Realm. This has led to the muddying or an outright denial of class struggles in the English civil war.

Dow shows that a number of historians have tended portray the period before the civil war as calm and that the English ruling elite would have never believed that civil war was on the agenda. But relying on Brain Manning’s work Dow paints an alternative picture of life before the war stating that Manning had “forcefully argued that economic discontent and popular unrest were important elements in producing an atmosphere of crisis before and after 1640 … that this eruption of the lower and middling orders into the political arena crucially affected the alignment of political groupings within the elite … parliament’s appeal to the ‘middling sort of people’ was … to release one of the most dynamic forces of the decade and substantially promote the cause of popular radicalism”.

On the section called Parliamentarians and Republicans Dow examines the philosophical basis for the Civil War. He explains that before the Civil war the English ruling elite was largely content with the divine rule of kings. Society was in order and that everything was ordained by God.

But as the Marxist political writer D North explains a closer examination brings a different picture “Until the early seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that the ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of life were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt the death blow to the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political structures that rested upon it, was well under way. The discoveries in astronomy profoundly changed the general intellectual environment”.

It would be wrong of course to mechanically apply this type of reason to the thinking of parliamentary opposition to the King. It was after all mostly confused and not coherently thought out. According to Dow (p15) “Four major issues were touched upon by these new writers, the nature and location of sovereignty, the origins of government in the consent of the people, the welfare of the people as the end or purpose of government and the role of common people in resisting the king”. Dow attempts in this chapter to establish a link between the new philosophy and the actions of players of the revolution.

Dow correctly spends some time on the philosophy James Harrington. The importance of Harrington is that his writings are a confirmation of the relationship between political thought and political action. Dow however downplays Harrington grasp of the relationship between property and power saying he was not a “proto Marxist”. While this is true he was a writer who anticipated a materialist understanding of social and political events.

For Dow the chief ideologues of the revolution were the radical groups such as the Levellers, Diggers etc. He states on page 8 that “Ideological and organizational advances were made by radicals who were not matched until the 1760s. Although the Levellers did not achieve power, and succeeded more in frightening those who did hold power than in convincing them of the merits of the radical case., their beliefs and their programme opened up new vistas of political participation, religious toleration and social equality. If not for all men then at least for very significant sections of the middling classes”.

The Levellers according to Dow were “founding fathers of the working class movement”. Dow claimed the Levellers broke new ground.” They grounded their programme of anew ideological basis by developing arguments based on doctrines of natural rights and popular sovereignty. And they mobilized support for their movement by employing sophisticated modern techniques of propaganda and organization”.

I do not agree with Dow on this assessment of the Levellers. As A L Morton says of the Levellers “it was a radical but not a working class party: indeed, how could it be at a time when the working class as we know it was only beginning to exist? Still less was it a ‘socialist’ party in the sense of advocating the type of egalitarian and agrarian communism which was widespread at this time” and to add was not articulately expressed (until) Winstanley and his Diggers or ‘true Levellers’.

Dow admits it is difficult however to paint an exact picture of what constituted the Leveller party and it was as the Baptist Henry Dunne said a “very heterogeneous body”. It is to Dow’s credit he places the rise of the Levellers in a socio-economic context “The socio economic preconditions for the rise of the movement like the Levellers had been created by long term changes in landholding and in the manufacturing. Those changes which had adversely affected the status and prosperity of the urban and rural ‘middling sort’ of people were especially important in providing potential supporters for the Levellers, who were to become principally the spokesmen for the ‘industrious sort’. Pressure on the smaller peasant farmer who lacked the resources of his larger neighbour to benefit from the expanding market and rising prices: the discontent of the insecure copyholder subject to rack-renting and the fear of the small cottager or husbandman at the prospect of enclosure, produce dissatisfaction which the Levellers could tap and issues on which they could take a stand.

Of even greater significance were the problems of the small craftsmen and tradesmen, particularly in the towns, whose independence seemed threatened by large scale merchants and entrepreneurs. The existence of such problems in London was crucially important, for the capital was to provide the core of the Leveller movement. Here, a large pool of discontent existed among journeymen unable, because of changes in the structure of manufacturing to find the resources to set up as masters in their own right. Anger smoulder among small tradesmen and merchants chafing at the alleged oppression of the guilds”.

Dow makes the point that the Levellers tapped into a growing hostility from people especially in London towards a deal with the monarchy. An outward display of this came about through the army at Putney. Dow makes a very perceptive point that “The radicalisation of sections of the rank and file did not happen solely, or even directly, because of Leveller influence, it happened because soldiers’ perception of their own ill treatment at the hands of the Presbyterian majority produced a political consciousness on which the Levellers could capitalize”.

Dow crucially examines the nature of the society, or specifically sections of the society, from which the Leveller movement sprang. Several attempts have been made to explain a class background to the Leveller movement and the people whose support it attracted. While it is prudent to acknowledge David Underdown’s warning that “Class is a concept that can be applied to seventeenth-century English society only with the greatest possible caution”.

Dow relies heavily on the work of Professor Brian Manning’s recently revised study, The English People and the English Revolution. Manning who was a member of the Radical group the SWP tries like Dow to examine the Levellers “from a socialist perspective”. But seems to contradict himself using Manning’s own words “that some of the ‘middling sort’ played a crucial role in the revolution”.

The book is a very good introduction to the subject of radicalism in the English Revolution. Dow’s work on the Levellers is equally important. To end with I concur with A L Morton who said “A Party that held the centre of the stage for three of the most crucial years in our nation’s history, voiced the aspirations of the unprivileged masses, and was able to express with such force ideas that have been behind every great social advance since their time, cannot be regarded as wholly a failure or deserve to be wholly forgotten”.

Sources

Glenn Burgess, “A Matter of Context: ‘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: 1-4

Lecture 7 The English Civil War http://www.historyguide.org/earlymod/lecture7c.html

Bibliography

Brian Manning, “The Levellers and Religion” in J. F. McGregor and Barry Reay (editors), Radical Religion in the English Revolution, Oxford University Press, 1986, page 241.

David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-60, Oxford University Press, 1987, page 168.

Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, Bookmarks, London, 1991, page 7.

F. D. Dow, Radicalism in the English Revolution 1640-60, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1985, chapter 1.

A. L. Morton (editor) Freedom in Arms: A Selection of Leveller Writings, Lawrence and Wishart, London 1975, page 101.

Conal Condren, The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts: An Essay on Political Theory, Its Inheritance, and the History of Ideas, Princeton NJ, 1985, ch. 5, especially pp. 138-41.

The book is a defence of Stone’s historical line on the Civil War. It is broken down into two parts with four chapters; the fourth is an update on Stone’s previous position written in 1985. Part one is titled Historiography sub titled Theories of revolution. Stone works through a number of sociological and Marxist theories as to the revolutionary nature of the English Civil war. Stone’s enquiry on the nature of the English Revolution was prompted by his time at Princeton University in America. While teaching at Princeton he came under extensive attack by his students for his leanings towards a social/economic read Marxist interpretation of the Civil War. My own criticism of him is that he never really says what he thinks at this time and his definition of what a Marxist theory of the English Revolution should look like. Much of his defence of Marx and Engel’s is limited and opens the door to attack from the revisionists.

Stone admits himself that he enjoyed his work at Princeton and one writer describes this impact “ When Lawrence Stone arrived in Princeton and unpacked his intellectual baggage, he released a fresh set of ideas, which are still buzzing in the air, not merely here but everywhere in the country,” said his colleague at Princeton, Robert Darnton. “History, as he presented it to rapt audiences of students and colleagues, cannot be confined to the tiny elite who dominate events. It involves entire populations. To be understood adequately, it requires some mastery of demography, economics, and political science. To be brought alive, it should be narrated in a brisk style, seasoned with amusing anecdotes and provocative arguments — the more heretical, the better. Lawrence was always in a scrap, always making the fur fly and the ideas soar. He set the pace in what emerged in the 1960s as the new social history, and he remained our pre-eminent historian until the day of his death.”

Lawrence Stone’s main argument in his 1972 Causes of the English Revolution isthat “the dissolution of the Government caused the War, not the War the dissolution of the Government.” Stone in the book outlined certain “pre-conditions for revolution” in the period from 1529 to 1629. This long view of the English revolution came under sustained attack during his lifetime and unfortunately remains so today. It doubtful that during the last ten years any book on the subject of the English revolution has contained any analysis of long term causes of the revolution.

It has been eleven years since the death of Stone and it must be said that his historical reputation has suffered by the continued onslaught on his work but I agree with David Cannadine when he said “Lawrence Stone belonged to a remarkable generation of British historians who dominated and defined their subject for nearly half a century, and which included Christopher Hill, G.R. Elton, Asa Briggs, J.H. Plumb, Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson. They all wrote widely and well, and reached a large audience in universities and far beyond. But in many ways, Stone was the most creative – and the most controversial – of them all.”

Cannadine goes on to describe Stone’s approach to historical research “the last thing Stone could ever have been called (and he was called many things) was a cautious or pedantic or inhibited historian, mouldering away obscurely or ineffectually into dry-as-dust. Known to his graduate students at Princeton as “Il Magnifico”, he was as unlike Casaubon as it was possible for a scholar to be. Instead of confining himself to one of history’s increasingly ring-fenced sub-specialisms, he moved back and forth from political to economic, to social, to cultural, to family, to educational, to architectural history. And, along the way, he ruthlessly ransacked other disciplines for their ideas and insights: sociology, statistics, economics, anthropology and psychology. For Stone was passionately curious about the past, was insatiably open to new ideas and approaches, had an unerring instinct for raising large questions, and took a robustly mischievous delight in controversy which was an example and inspiration to many, and a reproach and a provocation to many more.

In Stone’s Causes of the English Revolution he admitted that using this approach sometimes caused him to make mistakes. The mark of a good historian is firstly to limit as much as possible their mistakes but once made to admit them and they attempt to correct them. Stone did both of them. But this did not stop the unwarranted and downright viscous attacks on him and his work.

Perhaps the most public historical spat occurred when he became embroiled over the controversy the “Storm Over the Gentry”. In 1948, became close to the historical positions of R.H. Tawney who in turn encouraged Stone to publish the article in the Economic History Review entitled “The Anatomy of the Elizabethan Aristocracy”

Stone met Tawney during the war who was the leading social historian of Tudor and Stuart England. It was during this period he discussed research projects. It was also during this time that according to the National Oxford Biography of Stone “His impatience to get on with ‘real’ history earned him a reputation for arrogance during his post-war undergraduate year; on one occasion he stormed out of a revision class conducted by a newly appointed Christ Church tutor, Hugh Trevor-Roper. It would appear that Roper never forgave him for this but does not explain Ropers vitriolic attack.

Trevor-Roper accused Stone of failing to understand the technological nature of the documents he studied and had substantially exaggerated the level of indebtedness of the Aristocracy. See also C Thompson Critic of Stone’s work) This ‘mistake’ did not warrant Roper’s “academic vituperation”. Tawney was moved to defend Stone saying that ‘an erring colleague is not an Amalakite to be smitten hip and thigh’.

The problem with the paper was that it was too hastily written and contained some inaccurate information. But on a broader point while Stone himself described his early career as being a young Marxist perhaps his mistakes were the product of an incomplete assimilation of the Marxist method of Historical Materialism. In fact Stone himself soon moved away from any link with Marxist historiography and in his own words became as he put it in an interview in 1987, “an old fashioned Whig”.

While Stone repulsed this attack from Roper the feeling I get reading this book is that he really never understood the political nature of Roper’s and other conservative historians attack on his work. While it is true that Stone acknowledged the historian E H Carr “Study the historian before you begin to study the facts, and what bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog.

Stone never really deepens the readers knowledge of the political persuasion of Roper or other historians such as J H Dexter who Stone describes as a Liberal. While Hexter’s work is very readable here is not the place to evaluate its merit but it does warrant me to say that Hexter’s close links along with Roper to the American Encounter magazine which had close links to the CIA could have been exposed by Stone. In the 1950s Hugh Trevor-Roper went to a conference in Berlin which was largely made up of anti communists ,I am not sure if J H Hexter went to as well but writer and some Stalinist intelleclectuals such as Sidney Hook, Melvin J. Lasky, Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler. The result of this conference was the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its magazine Encounter. Trevor Roper wrote extensively for the magazine Encounter, is it any wonder that Stone who was mistakenly described as a Marxist historian would feel the brunt of Roper’s tongue.

This would in my opinion armed his readers with an understanding of the fact that attacks on Stone’s work were not just motivated by historical accuracy but had a very right wing political undertone.
The attack on Stone was unwarranted for a number of reasons. The main one being that after writing the Cause of the English Revolution he was moving away from any link to a Marxist analysis of the English Revolution.

Whether Stone was ultimately influenced by his detractors and therefore changed his theory of the revolution cannot be determined but he quite profoundly moved away from a semi Marxist standpoint adopted the French concept of histoire totale, ’. (I have put a link in my sources from Wikipedia on the French School.) According to one writer “It was during this period “Stone was part of a group of young historians who prised the infant journal Past and Present loose from its Marxist origins to become the flagship in Britain of the new social history“ In 1979 he astonished readers of Past and Present with an article, ‘The revival of narrative’ (reprinted in The Past and the Present Revisited, 1987), which sharply attacked the dehumanization implicit in much quantitative or ‘theoretical’ history, advocating instead the accumulation of masses of small-scale anecdotal material. Interspersed with this work was a steady stream of serious journalism, analysing and frequently finding wanting current historical scholarship.

Sources

http://historiacomprometida.blogspot.com/2008/11/lawrence-stone-1920-1999.html

David Cannadine’s Obituary: Professor Laurence Stone Saturday, 26 June 1999 Guardian
Guardian Obituary
E H Carr What Is History

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_School

Before the debates Cromwell was a conservative member of what was called the ‘middling sor’t who after Putney was moved to cut off the Kings head and establish a republic some years after the debates. It has been fashionable amongst modern biographers to view Cromwell from a 21st century standpoint which I agree with and while this does uncover many interesting facets of Cromwell it is also important to bear in mind he was a man from the 17th century although a very special one of whom the Yorkshire poet Andrew Marvell said “if these the times, then this must be the man”.

Cromwell

Oliver Cromwell was born in Huntingdon, near Cambridge on April 25th 1599, four years before the end of Queen Elizabeth 1st reign. He was one of ten children only seven survived childhood and he was the only one to survive late into adulthood. His mother Elizabeth had been widowed before she married Oliver’s father. She came from a respectable Norfolk family and had a small inheritance from her first marriage. Her family farmed lands near Ely cathedral.

Cromwell’s father, Robert was the second son of a knight and occupied a ‘median position in society’. In Cromwell’s own words ‘I was by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in obscurity’. Little is known about his early life although one suspect tale had him bloodying the nose of Charles Stuart Later to become King Charles 1st. It would be feasible to argue that when he attended grammar school he would have come under the influence of the master Dr. Thomas Beard, who was a Cambridge graduate and a clergyman.

Beard had written on the question of the English church. He preached a puritan faith which put forward that mans rewards were to be found not solely in heaven but on earth as well. Beard wrote of kings and rulers that they were not only’ more hardened and bold to sin’ but were also want to ‘ boldly exempt themselves from all corrections and punishments due unto them’. Much of Beards strongly Calvinist and anti Catholic teachings would impact on Cromwell in later life.

From 1617-20 Cromwell studied law in London (this is hotly contested by some historians) where he may well of made acquaintances with many of the people who would later play an important role in the civil war. Of all the MPs between 1640-42 over 300 had been to one of the Inns of Court, one being Sir Thomas Fairfax who was later to lead parliaments army against the king. In 1621 he went back to Huntingdon where he concentrated on farming the family lands. At the age of 29 he became MP when he was elected as one of the two burgesses of Huntingdon. When Cromwell took his seat parliament was already in a state of flux over the question of the king’s prerogative and of parliament’s role in society. Previously six of Cromwell’s relatives had been imprisoned for refusing to pay the enforced loan demanded by Charles 1st.

Antonia Fraser writes of this time  ‘For him there were already in practice two divergent points of view-one basically royal and one critical of it- which may for convenience sake be termed parliamentary’. In 1640 he became MP for Cambridge and entered the short parliament, which was followed, by the Long parliament in the same year. He quickly became an important figure within parliament. He sat on 18 committees and moved the second reading of a bill calling for annual parliaments. Cromwell’s reading at this time was limited to the bible; the only other book he told people to read was Raleigh’s History of the World.

It is not disputed that Oliver Cromwell was a powerful figure in 17th Century England.History imparted Cromwell with an extraordinary power and authority. He carried with him the hopes and aspirations of a new social class. Many historians have sought to obscure the inner social struggle that underpinned the ‘great drama of the seventeenth Century’. The 1640s began with a parliament that although saw it self as the main representing vehicle of the people it was based on a very narrow franchise. Its Lower House was three times as rich as the House of Lords. Yet it was still under the control of the King who could call it and close it as he chooses.

Parliament began increasingly to need a defence against the king and began to create its own army. This army was at the beginning never seen as a threat or replacement to parliament. But it soon took on a life of its own and began to recruit into it the most courageous and resolute members of society. It is this reason that it was to become the most resolute prosecutor of the war against Charles 1.

Charles and his court were representatives of the Episcopal or Anglican religious order, alongside the Nobility and higher clergy. The Presbyterians were the party of the high middle class today, while the Independents were the party of the lower middle class. In a simple sense the Presbyterian stood for a limited monarchy, the Independents stood for a republic. The contradictory position of the Presbyterians was a mirror of the contradictory position of the middle class in the fact that it oscillated between the nobility and the plebeians.

Much of the time even overtly political and economic events were shrouded in a religious mist. Both sides believed they were acting legitimately according to Guizot” When the time came for drawing the sword, all were astonished and deeply moved, now however, both parties mutually accused each other of illegality and innovation, and both were justified in making the charge: for the one had violated. The ancient rights of the country, and had no adjured the maxims of tyranny, and the other demanded, in the name of principles still confused and chaotic, liberties and a power which had until then been unknown’.

As the civil war raged, lines of demarcation began to appear; the Royalist inside parliament left the Commons and joined the king at York. It was also during the early part of the 1640s.that the power of parliament began to wane and essentially the fate of ‘democracy’ was to be decided not in the realm of debates but by the cavalry on the battlefield. Cromwell was also clear on what type of army he wanted. He said to Hampden’ I will raise such men as have the fear of god before them and make some conscience of what they do and I warrant you they will not be beaten’. When speaking to free landowners and artisans that he had enlisted ‘I will not cozen you by perplexed expressions in my commission about fighting for king and parliament. If the king chanced to be in the body of the enemy, I would as soon discharge my pistol upon him as upon any private man; and if your conscience will not let you do the like, I advise you not to enlist yourselves under me’. In many ways Cromwell not only built an army he built an armed party.

Putney Debates 1647

Cromwell came to Putney in a very strong position both politically and militarily. He had just defeated the King although he was in the middle of negotiations he still felt in a position of strength to invite the Levellers to a meeting of the army for a debate on manhood suffrage.

The Grandees (which was to become the nickname of supporters of Cromwell and Ireton) did have some idea of what was going to come up at Putney after all they did invite the Leveller influenced agitators and their civilian supporters so they were not completely taken by surprise by the Leveller document The Agreement of the People demands for a wider franchise. Cromwell while not being a complete political virgin was forced to rely heavily of Henry Ireton in his dealings with the Levellers who had prepared well for their debate with the Grandees.

 Coming to Putney Cromwell was determined at all costs to stay in charge of the army and worked throughout the debates to preserve the unity of the army.In the run up to Putney tensions between Parliament and the New Model Army existed over pay arrears and the attempt by Parliament to disband the army and send large sections of the most militant sections to Ireland. Parliament and the Lords were mindful of growing “Distemper and Mutiny in the army.

Parliaments concern was expressed by The Declaration of the Dislike of both Houses to a Petition from the Army.” That the Two Houses of Parliament having received Information of a dangerous Petition, with Representations annexed, tending to put the Army into a Distemper and Mutiny, to put Conditions upon the Parliament, and obstruct the Relief of Ireland, which hath been contrived and promoted by some Persons in the Army; they do declare their high Dislike of that Petition, their Approbation and Esteem of their good Service who first discovered it, and of all such Officers and Soldiers as have refused to join in it; and that for such as have been abused, and by the Persuasion of others drawn to subscribe it, if they shall for the future manifest their Dislike of what they have done, by forbearing to proceed any further in it, it shall not be looked upon as any Cause to take away the Remembrance and Sense the Houses have of the good Service they have formerly done; but they shall still be retained in their good Opinion, and shall be cared for with the rest of the Army, in all Things necessary and fitting for the Satisfaction of Persons that have done so good and faithful Service, and as may be expected from a Parliament so careful to perform all Things appertaining to Honour and Justice: And on the other Side it is Declared, That all those who shall continue in their distempered Condition, and go on in advancing and promoting that Petition, shall be looked upon, and proceeded against, as Enemies to the State, and Disturbers of the Public Peace.”

These tensions boiled over at a series of debates which took place at Safron Walden. They highlighted the fact that growing sections of the army i.e. its more radical sections the Agitators were becoming increasingly disatified with parliaments attack on them and most importantly had a growing frustration over pay.The soldiers’ grievances were expressed in the Apologie of the Common Souldiers:“Can we be satisfied with a Complement, when our fellow Souldiers suffer at every Assize for acts meerly relating to the Warre?” . The other greviance was over being sent to Ireland the pamphlet’s authors ask: “Can this Irish Expedition be any thing else but a Designe to ruine and break this army in pieces?”. The Apologie of the Common Soldiers reported to the House of Commons on 30 April, It was published secretly on the 3 May. The Apologie demanded withdrawal of the charge that the soldiers were “enemies of the State” and attacked the proposals for disbandment. Repeating the request for arrears of pay, and support for widows, orphans and the disabled, it also stated that the army would not serve in Ireland “until our just desires be granted”.

Some historians such as Mark Kishlansky have downplayed the level of social and political conscoiusness in the army. He questions the level of Leveller involvement citing the fact that the dispute in army was largely over pay. But at Safron Walden it was not just a matter of pay but you saw the first indication of political demands and more significantly soldiers were showing a level of political independence through the setting up of spokesman for their cause in the form of agitators. The growing Leveller influence in the army can be detected in the statement that the soldiers saw that their “liberties as Englishmen are 10,000 times more important than our arrears of pay”.

In a second document A Second Apologie of all the private Souldiers in his Excellencies Sir Thomas Fairfax his Army…” the soldiers’ complaints become a focused political attack “wee see that Oppression is as great as ever if not greater”. Those that supported and faught for Parliament are “slighted, abused, beaten and dragge to Jayles, yea, to the utter ruine of their estates, and losse of their lives.” The pamphlet concludes with a list of grievances and contains political demand “That the Liberty of the Subject may no longer be enslaved, but that Justise and Judgement may be dealt to the meanest Subject of this Land, according to old Law.”

A series of letters and the growth of publications in the form of newsbooks shows that the army was remarkably well informed of parliaments actions as this letter from the Clarke papers relates sent from London, 30 March, 1647.”Yesterday the House satt very late in the night about the Army. They have voted all those that had any hand in the Petition to be proceeded against as Enemies to the State, and have sent for Commissary Generall Ireton, Colonell Hammond, Lieutennant Collonell Hammond, Collonell Lilborne, and Lieutennant Colonel Pride to appeare before the House.d They have likewise sent for Major Generall Skippon privately to come with all speed to the Army. They have likewise ordered that those foote that are to bee transported shall have one moneths pay of their Arreares and a fortnights advance when they are on shippboard, and the Horse to have a moneths pay when they are over, and this to be performed, but when, they must not question. There is likewise orders to be given imediately for the seperatting of the Forces intended for Ireland from those that are intended to be disbanded some miles distance, for feare those that intend not for that service should pollute the other, and all this bussinesse ariseth from an information that one of the Army gave to Colonell Harley which the House will not divulge”.

Also the Clarke papers shows that the Agitators, which were Leveller influenced kept close contact with rank and file soldiers. In this Letter from the Agitators to the severall Regiments.”Gentlemen and Fellow Souldiers, wee greet you well.These are to let you knowe, that wee have received Letters from London this day certifying, that still the dividing and soe the destroying designes are in hand. Before you were the Marke shott at without your Officers, and they loath to see you in such a condition designed to ruine they appeare now to speake and act for you; but noe sooner came they to speake on your behalfes, but they become the Marke instead of you. This is now the thing in hand to divide betweene you and them, and that is either propounding or giving you your arreares, and soe [to] take you from your Officers, thereby to destroy them, and then to worke about their designes with you also, which will make your money be but little useful to you. As soone as you have it and you disbanded you may be prest away for Ireland, or hang’d in England, for prosecuting the Petition, or refusing to goe for Ireland; which wee question not but many of us shall be found guiltie of, some already saying if you be but disbanded, if you will not goe they will drawe you along like doggs. Fellow Souldiers, the summe of all this is, if you doe but stand, and not accept of any thing nor doe any thing without the concent of the whole Army, you will doe good to your selves, your Officers, and the whole kingdome. Stand with your Officers, and one with another you need not feare. If you divide you destroy all. Therefore once more, Fellow Souldiers, as you tender your owne wellfares and the welfares of us all, acquaint one another with these things, and resolve neither to take monie, nor march from one another, but lett all your actions be joyn’d. And if any orders should come to your particular Regiments to march from the rest of the Army, march not while you have consulted with the rest of the Army. Be sure you take heed how you obey any such orders, untill you have acquainted and consulted with the rest of the Army. Be active and unanimous, the whole Army will assist you, if you doe but acquaint them with it. Doe nothing for your owne securitie, but what may secure your reall and faithfull Officers as well as your selves. Be assured they are yours, while you are their”s.

The Levellers took up the demands of the rank and file soldiers over pay and Ireland in one such document An Appeal to Parliament From the Large Petition of the Levellers1 (March 1647) “But such is our misery, that after the expense of so much precious time, blood, and treasure, and the ruin of so many thousands of honest families, in recovering our liberty, we still find the nation oppressed with grievances of the same destructive nature as formerly, though under other notions, and which are so much the more grievous unto us because they are inflicted in the very time of this present Parliament, under God the hope of the oppressed.“And although all new illegal patents are by you abolished, yet the oppressive monopoly of Merchant Adventurers and others do still remain, to the great abridgment of the liberty of the people, and to the extreme prejudice of all such industrious people as do depend on clothing or woollen manufacture (it being the staple commodity of this kingdom and nation), and to the great discouragement and disadvantage of all sorts of tradesmen, seafaring men, and hindrance of shipping and navigation”.

This attack on the growing capitalist nature of the oppression on poor people should have given the Grandees ample warning as to the nature of the debate to take place. It is my contention that Cromwell welcomed the debate in order to take on the Levellers. Even a cursory glance at the speeches of Cromwell and more importantly Ireton you can see were no off the cuff answers to the Levellers but well prepared and well thought out.
The first thing that strikes you at the beginning of the debates is the democratic nature and openness expressed in opening remarks made by Cromwell “That the meeting was for public businesses; those that had anything to say concerning the public business, they might have liberty to speak”.

Whether the Grandees had had the time to read and take in the main discussion document of the debates that being the Levellers Agreement of the People is a matter for debate. I believe despite Cromwell saying that they were new ideas I believe he was well prepared and was in reality playing for time.

Cromwell: “These things that you have now offered, they are new to us: they are things that we have not at all (at least in this method and thus circumstantially) had any opportunity to consider of, because they came to us but thus, as you see; this is the first time we had a view of them.Truly this paper does contain in it very great alterations of the very government of the kingdom, alterations from that government that it hath been under, I believe I may almost say, since it was a nation—I say, I think I may almost say so. And what the consequences of such an alteration as this would be, if there were nothing else to be considered, wise men and godly men ought to consider. I say, if there were nothing else [to be considered] but the very weight and nature of the things contained in this paper. Therefore, although the pretensions in it, and the expressions in it, are very plausible, and if we could leap out of one condition into another that had so specious things in it as this hath, I suppose there would not be much dispute—though perhaps some of these things may be very well disputed. How do we know if, whilst we are disputing these things, another company of men shall [not] gather together, and put out a paper as plausible perhaps as this? I do not know why it might not be done by that time you have agreed upon this, or got hands to it if that be the way. And not only another, and another, but many of this kind. And if so, what do you think the consequence of that would be? Would it not be confusion? Would it not be utter confusion? Would it not make England like the Switzerland country, one canton of the Swiss against another, and one county against another? I ask you whether it be not fit for every honest man seriously to lay that upon his heart? And if so, what would that produce but an absolute desolation—an absolute desolation to the nation—and we in the meantime tell the nation: ‘It is for your liberty; ’tis for your privilege; ’tis for your good.’ (Pray God it prove, so whatsoever course we run.) But truly, I think we are not only to consider what the consequences are if there were nothing else but this paper, but we are to consider the probability of the ways and means to accomplish [the thing proposed]: that is to say, whether,a according to reason and judgment, the spirits and temper of the people of this nation are prepared to receive and to go on along with it, and [whether] those great difficulties [that] lie in our way [are] in a likelihood to be either overcome or removed. Truly, to anything that’s good, there’s no doubt on it, objections may be made and framed; but let every honest man consider whether or no there be not very real objections [to this] in point of difficulty I know a man may answer all difficulties with faith, and faith will answer all difficulties really where it is, butc we are very apt, all of us, to call that faith, that perhaps may be but carnal imagination, and carnal reasonings. Give me leave to say this. There will be very great mountains in the way of this, if this were the thing in present consideration; and, therefore, we ought to consider the consequences, and God hath given us our reason that we may do this. It is not enough to propose things that are good in the end, but suppose this model were an excellent model, and fit for England and the kingdom to receive, it is our duty as Christians and men to consider consequences, and to consider the way.But really I shall speak to nothing but that that, as before the Lord I am persuaded inmy heart, tends to uniting of us in one, [and] to that that God will manifest to us to be”.

It is possible to take at face value Cromwell’s claim that he agreed with some of the Levellers demands. But his statement above clearly outlines that Cromwell had major differences over the nature of the franchise and went on to warn the Levellers that their document breached their engagement with the army and not to depart from it with their document the Agreement of the People.

He reminded them that “He that departs from that that is a real engagement and a real tie upon him, I think he transgresses without faith;for faith will bear up men in every honest obligation, and God does expect from menthe performance of every honest obligation. And therefore I have no more to say butthis: we having received your paper, we shall amongst ourselves consider what to do; and before we take this into consideration, it is fit for us to consider how far we are obliged, and how far we are free; and I hope we shall prove ourselves honest menwhere we are free to tender anything to the good of the public. And this is that I thought good to offer to you upon this paper”.

Wildman speaking on behalf of the Levellers replied by saying”that he knows about the loyalty to the engagement to the army”.

Ireton’s reply to this was “Sure this gentleman hath not been acquainted with our engagements. For he that will cry out of breach of engagement in slight and trivial things and things necessitated to—I can hardly think that man that is so tender of an engagement as to frame, or [atleast] concur with, this book in their insisting upon every punctilio of [the]Engagement,1 can be of that principle that no engagement is binding further than thathe thinks it just or no. For he hints that, if he that makes an engagement (be it whatit will be) have further light that this engagement was not good or honest, then he is free from it. Truly, if the sense were put thus, that a man finds he hath entered into an engagement and thinks that it was not a just engagement, I confess something might be said that [such] a man might declare himself for his part [ready] to suffer some penalty upon his person or upon his party. The question is, whether it be an engagement to another party. Now if a mani venture into an engagement from him[self] to another, and find that engagement [not] just and honest, he must apply himself to the other party and say: ‘I cannot actively perform it; I will make you amends as near as I can.’ Upon the same ground men are not obliged [to be obedient]to any authority that is set up, though it were this authority that is proposed here”

Cromwell and Ireton spent a lot of time in the early exchanges at Putney seeking to avoid an open discussion on the Levellers document the Agreement of the People. Hence the fact that Cromwell was more than ready to head the suggestion that such important matters should not be discussed until God had been consulted hence the long prayer meetings.

An intervention by Petty of whom is very little known sparked the most important debate on the nature of democracy in the 17th century. Petty “We judge that all inhabitants that have not lost their birthright should have an equal voice in elections.

Petty position which seems to advocate near universal suffrage has been challenged by Christopher Thompson who believed Petty’s argument changed.” It is now possible to see how Petty’s position changed during the course of the debate at Putney. He came to it as a supporter of the agreement and argued for Manhood suffrage. But he, like the other supporters of the Agreement, had to bear in mind the necessity of carrying the Army with them if it was to be an effective instrument for implementing their policies.Once it became clear that manhood suffrage could not be carried through the General Council of the Army without serious dispute”, Petty was prepared to respond to the suggestions made at the end of the debate and talk about excluding groups like apprentices, servants and alms-takers who might be held to berepresented through the votes of their masters. This was an attempt to secure agreement on the extent of the franchise. Nor should it be for-gotten that both Cromwell and, less keenly, Ireton were prepared to accept an extension of the franchise within their own terms. The committee to which the issue was referred on 3oth October produced Proposals that would have enfranchised everyone who had fought for or contributed to Parliament’s cause between 29 November 1642 and 14 June 1645,whether or not they came within the qualifications to be decided by the House of Commons”

In answer to Petty Ireton speaks “ The exception that lies in it is this: It is said, “The people of England” etc. . . . They are to be distributed “according to the number of the inhabitants;” and this doth make me think that the meaning is that every man that is an inhabitant is to be equally considered, and to have an equal voice in the election of the representors, those persons that are for the General Representative; and if that be the meaning then I have something to say against it.

COL. RAINBOROW: I desired that those that had engaged in it [should speak] for really I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he has not had a voice to put himself under; and I am confident that when I have heard the reasons against it, something will be said to answer those reasons, insomuch that I should doubt whether he was an Englishman or not that should doubt of these things.

COMMISSARY IRETON: That’s [the meaning of] this ["according to the number of the inhabitants."] Give me leave to tell you that if you make this the rule I think you must flee for refuge to an absolute natural Right, and you must deny all Civil Right; and I am sure it will come to that in the consequence. For my part, I think it is no right at all. I think that no person has a right to an interest or share in the disposing or determining of the affairs of the Kingdom, and in choosing those that shall determine what laws we shall be ruled by here, no person has a right to this that has not a permanent fixed interest in this Kingdom; and those persons together are properly the Represented of this Kingdom, and consequently are to make up the Representors of this Kingdom who, taken together, do comprehend whatsoever is of real or permanent interest in the Kingdom. And I am sure I cannot tell what otherwise any man can say why a foreigner coming in amongst us–or as many as will be coming in amongst us, or by force or otherwise selling themselves here, or at least by our permission having a being here–why they should not as well lay claim to it as any other. We talk of birthright. Truly [by] birthright there is thus much claim. Men may justly have by birthright, by their very being born in England, that we should not seclude them out of England, that we should not refuse to give them air, and place, and ground, and the freedom of the highways and other things, to live amongst us; not [to] any man that is born here, though by his birth there come nothing at all to him that is part of the permanent interest of this Kingdom. That I think is due to a man by birth. But that by a man’s being born here he shall have a share in that power that shall dispose of the lands here, and of all things here, I do not think it a sufficient ground. I am sure if we look upon that which is the utmost within man’s view of what was originally the constitution of this Kingdom, [if we] look upon that which is most radical and fundamental, and which if you take away there is no man has any land, any goods, [or] any civil interest, that is this: that those that choose the Representors for the making of Laws by which this State and kingdom are to be governed are the persons who, taken together, do comprehend the local interest of this Kingdom; that is, the persons in whom all land lies, and those in Corporations in whom all trading lies. This is the most fundamental Constitution of this Kingdom, which if you do not allow you allow none at all. This Constitution has limited and determined it that only those shall have voices in Elections. It is true as was said by a Gentleman near me, the meanest man in England ought to have [a voice in the election of the government he lives under] . . . I say this, that those that have the meanest local interest, that man that has but forty shillings a year, he has as great voice in the Election of a Knight for the shire as he that has ten thousand a year or more.

COL. RAINBOROW: Truly, Sir, I am of the same opinion I was; and am resolved to keep it ’till I know reason why I should not. Therefore I say that either it must be the law of God or the law of man that must prohibit the meanest man in the Kingdoms to have this benefit as well as the greatest. I do not find anything in the law of God that a lord shall choose 20 Burgesses, and a Gentleman but two, or a poor man shall choose none. I find no such thing in the law of nature, nor in the law of nations. But I do find that all Englishmen must be subject to English laws, and I do verily believe that there is no man but will say that the foundation of all law lies in the people, and if [it lie] in the people, I am to seek for this exemption. And truly I have thought something [else], in what a miserable distressed condition would many a man that has fought for the Parliament in this quarrel be? I will be bound to say that many a man whose zeal and affection to God and this Kingdom has carried him forth in this cause has so spent his estate that in the way the State, the Army are going, he shall not hold up his head; and when his estate is lost, and not worth 40s. A year, a man shall not have any interest, and there are many other ways by which estates men have do fall to decay, if that be the rule which God in his providence does use. A man when he has an estate has an interest in making laws, when he has none, he has no power in it. So that a man cannot loose that which he has for the maintenance of his family, but he must loose that which God and nature has given him. Therefore I do [think] and am still of the same opinion: that every man born in England cannot, ought not, neither by the law of God nor the law of nature, to be exempted from the choice of those who are to make laws, for him to live under, and for him, for ought I know, to loose his life under. Therefore I think there can be no great stick in this.

COMMISSARY GEN. IRETON: All the main thing that I speak for is because I would have an eye to property. I hope we do not come to contend for victory, but let every man consider with himself that he do not go that way to take away all property. For here is the case of the most fundamental part of the Constitution of the Kingdom, which if you take away, you take away all by that. Here are men of this and this quality are determined to be the Electors of men to the Parliament, and they are all those who have any permanent interest in the Kingdom, and who, taken together, do comprehend the whole interest of the Kingdom. I mean by permanent, local, that is, not anywhere else. As for instance; he that has a freehold, and that freehold cannot be removed out of the Kingdom; and so there’s a [freeman of a] Corporation, a place which has the privilege of a market and trading, which if you should allow to all places equally, I do not see how you could preserve any peace in the Kingdom, and that is the reason why in the Constitution we have but some few market towns. Now those people [that have freeholds] and those that are the freemen of Corporations, were looked upon by the former Constitution to comprehend the permanent interest of the Kingdom. For [firstly] he that has his livelihood by his trade, and by his freedom of trading in such a Corporation which he cannot exercise in another, he is tied to that place, his livelihood depends upon it. And secondly, that man has an interest, has a permanent interest there, upon which he may live, and live a freeman without dependence. These Constitutions this kingdom has looked at. Now I wish we may all consider of what right you will challenge, that all the people should have right to Elections. Is it by the right of nature? If you will hold forth that as your ground, then I think you must deny all property too, and this is my reason. For thus: by the same right of nature, whatever it be that you pretend, by which you can say, “one man has an equal right with another to the choosing of him that shall govern him”, by the same right of nature, he has an equal right in any goods he sees: meat, drink, clothes, to take and use them for his sustenance. He has a freedom to the land, [to take] the ground, to exercise it, till it; he has the [same] freedom to any thing that any one does account himself to have any propriety in.

COL. RAINBOROW: To the thing itself property. I would fain know how it comes to be the property [of some men, and not of others]. As for estates, and those kind of things, and other things that belong to men, it will be granted that they are property; but I deny that that is a property, to a Lord, to a Gentleman, to any man more then another in the Kingdom of England. If it be a property, it is a property by a law; neither do I think, that there is very little property in this thing by the law of the land, because I think that the law of the land in that thing is the most tyrannical law under heaven, and I would fain know what we have fought for, and this is the old law of England and that which enslaves the people of England that they should be bound by laws in which they have no voice at all.

MR. PETTY: For this [argument] that it destroys all right [to property] that every Englishman that is an inhabitant of England should choose and have a choice in the Representatives, I suppose it is [on the contrary] the only means to preserve all property. For I judge every man is naturally free; and I judge the reason why men when they were in so great numbers [chose representatives was] that every man could not give his voice; and therefore men agreed to come into some form of Government that they who were chosen might preserve property. I would fain know, if we were to begin a Government, [whether you would say] ‘you have not 40s. a year, therefore you shall not have a voice’. Whereas before there was a Government every man had such a choice, and afterwards for this very cause they did choose Representatives, and put themselves into forms of Government that they may preserve property, and therefore it is not to destroy it [to give every man a choice].

COL. RICH (a Cavalry officer): I confess [there is weight in] that objection that the Commissary General last insisted upon; for you have five to one in the kingdom that have no permanent interest. Some men [have] ten, some twenty servants, some more, some less. If the Master and servant shall be equal Electors, then clearly those that have no interest in the Kingdom will make it their interest to choose those that have no interest. It may happen, that the majority may by law, not in a confusion, destroy property; there may be a law enacted, that there shall be an equality of goods and estate. I think that either of the extremes may be urged to inconvenience. That is, men that have no interest as to Estate should have no interest as to Election.

COL. RAINBOROW: I should not have spoken again. I think it is a fine guided pill, but there is much danger, and it may seem to some that there is some kind of remedy, I think that we are better as we are. That the poor shall choose many, still the people are in the same case, are over voted still. And therefore truly, Sir, I should desire to go close to the business; and the thing that I am unsatisfied in is how it comes about that there is such a propriety in some freeborn Englishmen, and not [in] others.

COM. COWLING (an officer of the General Staff): Whether the younger son have not as much right to the Inheritance as the eldest?

COM. GEN. IRETON: Will you decide it by the light of nature?

COM. COWLING: Why Election was only 40s a year, which was more then 40;E a year now, the reason was [this], that the Commons of England were overpowered by the Lords, who had abundance of vassals, but that they might sill make their laws good against encroaching prerogatives, therefore they did exclude all slaves. Now the case is not so; all slaves have bought their freedoms. They are more free that in the commonwealth are more beneficial. There are men in the country . . . there is a tanner in Stanes worth 3000£:, and another in Reading worth 3 horseskins.

COM. GEN. IRETON: In the beginning of your speech you seem to acknowledge [that] by law, by civil Constitution, the propriety of having voices in Election was fixed in certain persons. So then your exception of your argument does not prove that by civil constitution they have no such propriety, but your argument does acknowledge [that] by civil [constitution they have such] propriety. You argue against this law, that this law is not good.

MR. WILDMAN: Unless I be very much mistaken we are very much deviated from the first Question. Instead of following the first proposition to inquire what is just, I conceive we look to prophesies, and look to what may be the event, and judge of the justness of a thing by the consequence. I desire we may recall [ourselves to the question] whether it be right or no. I conceive all that has been said against it will be reduced to this and another reason; that it is against a fundamental law, [and] that every person ought to have a permanent interest, because it is not fit that those should choose Parliaments that have no lands to be disposed of by Parliament.

COM. GEN. IRETON: If you will take it by the way, it is not fit that the Representees should choose the Representors, or the persons who shall make the law in the Kingdom, who have not a permanent fixed interest in the Kingdom.

MR. WILDMAN: Sir I do so take it; and I conceive that that is brought in for the same reason, that foreigners might come to have a voice in our Elections as well as the native Inhabitants.

COM. GEN. IRETON: That is upon supposition that these should be all Inhabitants.

MR. WILDMAN: Every person in England has as clear a right to Elect his Representative as the greatest person in England. I conceive that’s the undeniable maxim of Government: that all government is in the free consent of the people. If [so], then upon that account, there is no person that is under a just Government, or has justly his own, unless he by his own free consent be put under that government. This he cannot be unless he be consenting to it, and therefore, according to this maxim, there is never a person in England [but ought to have a voice in elections]. And therefore I should humbly move, that if the Question be stated which would soonest bring things to an issue–it might rather be this: whether any person can justly be bound by law, who doth not give his consent that such persons shall make laws for him?

COM. GEN. IRETON: Let the Question be so; whether a man can be bound to any law that he doth not consent to? And I shall tell you that he may and ought to be [bound to a law] that he doth not give a consent to, nor doth not choose any [to consent to], and I will make it clear. If a foreigner come within this Kingdom, if that stranger will have liberty [to dwell here] who has no local interest here–he is a man it’s true, has air that by nature we must not expel our Coasts, give him no being amongst us, nor kill him because he comes upon our land, comes up our stream, arrives at our shore. It is a peace of hospitality, of humanity, to receive that man amongst us. But if that man be received to a being amongst us I think that man may very well be content to submit himself to the law of the land: that is, the law that is made by those people that have a property, a fixed property, in the land.

COL. RAINBOROW: Sir I see that it is impossible to have liberty but all property must be taken away. If it be laid down for a rule, and if you will say it, it must be so. But I would fain know what the soldier has fought for all this while. He has fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to make him a perpetual slave.

COM. GEN. IRETON: I tell you what the soldier of the kingdom has fought for. First, the danger that we stood in was that one man’s will must be a law. The people of the kingdom must have this right at least, that they should not be concluded [but] by the Representative of those that had the interest of the Kingdom. Some men fought in this because they were immediately concerned and engaged in it. Other men who had no other interest in the kingdom but this, that they should have the benefit of those laws made by the Representative, yet [fought] that they should have the benefit of this Representative. They thought it was better to be concluded by the common consent of those that were fixed men and settled men that had the interest of this kingdom [in them], and from that way [said they] I shall know a law and have a certainty. Every man that was borne in it that has a freedom is a denizen, he was capable of trading to get money and to get estates by, and therefore this man I think had a great deal of reason to build up such a foundation of interest to himself. That is, that the will of one man should not be a law, but that the law of this Kingdom should be by a choice of persons to represent, and that choice to be made by the generality of the Kingdom. Here was a right that induced men to fight, and those men that had this interest, though this be not the utmost interest that other men have, yet they had some interest.

The result of the debate was a political stalemate. But Cromwell and Ireton had heard enough to believe that the Levellers represented a significant threat to not only to the army but represented a major threat to property.

The Levellers

While revisionist historians have downplayed the extent to which the Levellers were involved in the army pre Putney it is clear from petitions released by the Levellers that sections of the army were becoming far more aware of their position and that they represented an opposition to Cromwell and the Grandees.

A radical tract was in print by 29 October entitled A Call to all soldiers of the Army by the Free People of England which was a defence of the radical regiments and demanded a purge of Parliament amidst a call for the agitators to meet as an ‘exact council’ and to act with the ‘truest lovers of the people you could find’. One of the main aims of the document was to expose the “hypocrisy” and “deceit” of Cromwell and Ireton.

The General Council of the new Model army resided in Putney church essentially to discuss the Levellers Agreement of the People from 28th October to 11 November1647. According to H N Braislford ‘ When one compares these debates with those of its sittings at Reading in July, it is clear that in three months the temper and outlook of the army were changed. At Putney the mood was sultry and tense’. While it true that the grandees and the agitators were moving roughly in the same direction in July by October a huge chasm was to open up between them.

While Cromwell was no great theoretician, he was ambitious and with his class outlook had a tendency to develop his conduct to what was practical for the moment. It was a Levellers who were the main ‘ideologues of the movement’. Who had a certain capability for abstract thought, Cromwell had no such capability. He had a tendency to see things as they were at any given moment.

When Cromwell saw for the first time the Leveller tracts he knew what was at stake was not just a mere debate but who was to have power and what class would control it. He wasn’t the only one to recognise that Putney was a battle of contending class forces, Colonel Rainsborough in a little known passage from the Clarke Dairies cited ‘Sir, I see that it is impossible to have liberty but all property must be taken away. If you say it, it must be so. But I would fain know what the soldier hath fought for all this while? He hath fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to make him perpetual slave. We do find in all presses that go forth none must be pressed that are freehold men. When these gentlemen fall out among themselves, they shall press the poor scrubs to come and kill one another for them’. Do these comments represent an individual or did his words echo a much wider yet unconscious expression that Putney represented not just the people that took part but had a broader significance in the army and within the country itself.

What was Cromwell’s aim at Putney? It is generally agreed amongst historians that the debates were essentially renowned for a dramatic debate between the Grandees who were a somewhat conservative group amongst the middling sort and the Levellers who were representatives mainly of what to do would be today the petty bourgeoisie. The debates did not however immediately begin with the question of franchise and power.

According to B Coward Putney began ‘as an attempt by Cromwell to defend the strategy for a settlement he had followed ever since the end of the war and to defuse the recent Leveller attack on it. His main aim at Putney was to maintain the unity of the army behind a settlement programme based on the Heads of Proposals and his speeches at Putney are peppered with pleas to this effect “I shall speak to nothing but that, as before the Lord, I am persuaded in my heart tends to uniting us”. Cromwell throughout Putney sought that the army was pledged to keep the “engagements” that had bound the army since June. He had hoped that by debating with the Levellers that a common ground could be made between the heads of proposals and the Leveller’s statement the agreement of the people’.

The Levellers had other ideas and their disagreement with Cromwell stemmed from their social position rather than in any tactical nuances. In that sense it is important to view the Levellers in the context of the period. It is clear that much of what the Levellers fought for was incredibly radical for its time. The Levellers appeared and were in fact organised as a political party in the years 1645-46. They were responsible for many of modern day political techniques such as mass demonstrations, collecting petitions, leafleting and the lobby of MPs. Their strength mainly lay in London and other towns and had quite considerable support in the army. The movement was an extremely disparate group containing groups such as the Diggers or as they have called the True Levellers and Ranters who were on the extreme left wing of the Leveller movement.

The main plank of its manifesto was the call for a democratic republic in which the House of Commons would be more important than the House of Lords. A Leveller would have wanted redistribution and extension of the franchise, legal and economic reform on behalf of men of small property, artisans, yeoman, small merchants, and the very layer which made up the Levellers themselves.

Levellers also wished to democratise the gilds and the City of London, a decentralisation of justice and the election of local governors and stability of tenure for copyholders. While the Levellers were sympathetic to the poor, which stemmed from their religion which essentially was not different from that of Cromwell. They had no programme to bring about social change; they never advocated a violent overturning of society. Their class outlook, that being of small producers, conditioned their ideology. At no stage did the Levellers constitute a mass movement.

This contradiction caused some tension between their concern for the poor and their position of representatives of the small property owners. They had no opposition to private property and therefore they accepted that inequalities would always exist, they merely argued for the lot of the poor to be made more equitable. One of their members John Cooke explained ‘I am no advocate for the poore further then to provide bread and necessaries for them, without which, life cannot be maintained, let rich men feast, and the poore make hard meale, but let them have bread sufficient’. Knowing that they could not come to power through the presently constituted electorate the Levellers attempted to find constitutional ways of getting round it.

A draft constitution produced in 1647 called the Agreement of the People declared that the state had broken down in civil war and must be reformed on the basis of certain fundamental ‘native rights’ safeguarded even from a sovereign parliament: religious toleration, no tithes. The attack on parliament as sovereign went against one of the most fundamental reasons for the war in the first place. The agreement amongst other demands, called for biennial parliaments, franchise reform, only those who contracted into the new state by accepting the agreement were to have the vote.

The limitations of the Leveller program was cruelly exposed in a very famous exchange between Colonel Rainborough, leader of the Levellers in parliament and H. Ireton, Cromwell’s son in law. Rainsborough stated that ‘ The poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he and therefore every man that is to live under a government ought, first, by his own consent. To put himself under the government’.

This seemed all very democratic but ‘ freeborn Englishmen’ excluded servants and the poorer sections that did not constitute ‘ the people’. Christopher Hill says ‘ The Leveller conception of free Englishmen, was thus restricted, even if much wider, than that embodied in the existing franchise. Their proposals would perhaps have doubled the number of men entitled to vote. But manhood suffrage would have quadrupled it. The generals, generally horrified, pretended at Putney that the Levellers were more democratic than they were’.

To put it more simply the generals deliberately exaggerated the radicalism of the Levellers in order to label them extremists and to mobilise their own supporters against them. Cromwell correctly recognised that if the franchise was widened it would threaten his majority in parliament. Again Hill explains ‘ Defending the existing franchise Henry Ireton rejected the doctrine “that by a man being born here, he shall have a share in that power that shall dispose of the lands here and of all things here”. The vote was rightly restricted to those who “ had a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom”. Namely, the persons in whom all lands lies and those incorporation’s in whom all trading lies’

Ireton claimed the present House of Commons represented them and went on to ask by what right the vote was demanded for all free Englishmen. If by natural right, taking up the Levellers point that they should be free. Who could freely dispose of their own labour? Then Ireton could see no reason why men had as much natural right to property as to the vote. He went on to point out that if you give them the vote, then they will be the majority in parliament and they will give equal property rights to everybody. This argument completely confused Rainsborough and undermined his argument.

Cromwell was acutely aware that the ideas of the levellers and other smaller groups such as the Diggers were becoming a dangerous business. Cromwell said of what he call the “lunatics”, “you must break these men or they will break you”

The importance of the Levellers and to some extent the Diggers that they represented the aspirations of the poorest section of society. They were not a mass movement of the poor. While their ideas had very explosive social implications, the necessary objective conditions did not exist at the time.

The view that Cromwell’s role at Putney could be understood better within the context of contending social forces as been attacked by a growing number of revisionist historians. As early as the 1970s. The main aim of this group has been to attack any conception that historical events can be best understood within the context of a socio-economic or even Marxist viewpoint.

One such revisionist historian who has challenged the above premise is Conrad Russell who in his Origins of the English Civil War sought to explain the civil war from the standpoint of the Nobility not from any socio economic changes. Jim Holstun described Russell’s book as a “manifesto for historical revisionism”. Holstun went on to point out that Russell sought another way to explain the social changes that were taking place in the English revolution. That historians should concentrate on the upper yeomanry, the middling sort of people. Russell would often make the remark that he was not conversant with the terms feudalism and capitalism.

Austin Woolrych tends to down play the role of social forces in the debates but not to be extent of Mark Kishlansky who completely rejected what he called ‘social determinism’. Woolrych somewhat contentiously states that the army had refrained from political activity despite the tendency of the Presbyterians both religious and political to portray it as a “hot bed of sectaries and radicals’. If this is true then did Putney really drop from the skies? One cannot but disagree with the attempt of Woolrych to down play the movement of contending social forces in the run up to and during Putney.

While you cannot fault Woolrych for his erudition and his books are worth reading not so much for his analysis but for the tremendous usage of empirical material. His major weakness is he sees the debates at Putney in terms of individuals, if Wildman had done this, if the Levellers had not opposed the Grandees which is fine but if this appreciation of the individual is not coupled to a understanding that these individuals represented not only themselves but contending class forces then this tends to diminish the historical understanding.

In one passage Woolrych again tries to separate the debate at Putney from the general discussion within the army and outside it. ‘Anyone who strains to hear the voice of the soldiery in the Putney debates should be aware that, apart from one brief interjection by an unnamed agent, the only troopers who spoke that day were Sexby and Everard, and on the other two days recorded by Clarke the only others who opened their mouths were Lockyer and Allen. No agitator of a foot regiment is known to have spoken. Out of just fifty officer-agitator of a foot regiment is known to have spoken. Out of just fifty officer-agitators listed in October, twelve spoke in the course of the three-recorded days five of them only once, and very briefly. We should be very cautious about treating the Putney debates, wonderful as they are as the typical voice of the army”.

While it is true that the ordinary soldiers were thin on the ground the politics that were debated at Putney had a deep resonance inside the army. Even Woolrych is forced to describe such incidents where ‘open incitements to mutiny, and were already bearing poisoned fruit. Fairfax had lately ordered Colonel Robert Lilliburnes foot regiment to Newcastle, for sound military reasons but a party of new agents bearing copies of the Case of the Armie overtook it and urged it not to let the army be divided. Thereupon its soldiers turned back, held an unauthorised rendezvous and refused to obey their officers. Other regiments were in a state of incipient mutiny before the debates at Putney were would up’.

Perhaps the most cynical of the revisionist historians is Mark Kishlansky who says ‘Much has been written about ideology of the army, but most of it misconceived. A principle reason for this has been historians have assumed that the lowly social origins of many of the officers created a commitment to radical ideology. This is false on both factual and logical grounds. There were men of low birth among the new Model’s officers, and much has been made of Pride the drayman and Hewson the cobbler more still might be made of obscure officers like Sponger and Creamer whose surnames suggest backgrounds in trades and service. The army also contained a Cecil, a Sheffield, and three colonels who were knights. Yet careful study of the armies social origin, which lends support to the view that they were more traditional in nature (of solid status in rural and urban structures) still does not meet the real objection to existing interpretation- the fallacy of social determinism’.

In this quote Kishlansky is clearly having a dig at Christopher Hill who was the main advocate of a materialist view of History. While Kishlansky is perhaps the most vocal exponent of this view it is the prevailing academic view that there was no rising bourgeoisie and that people from different social classes can be seen on both sides. As can be seen earlier Russell places Cromwell as a figure from the declining gentry rather than the rising middle class.

This view has been opposed by A Talbot “Hill, of course, was well aware that there were gentlemen and landowners on the parliamentary side in the civil war an small farmers and artisans on the royalist side he had read enough Marx and Lenin to know that one could not expect a chemically pure revolution in which the members of one social class lined up one side of the barricades and those of the other on the opposite side. However, he was sensitive enough to his historical sources to detect the social currents that brought people of diverse social backgrounds into struggle against the king and well grounded enough in history to identify new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise which they appeared- as ideologists of the revolution ransacked the Bible and half understood historical precedent for some kind of theory to explain what they were doing’.

In conclusion hindsight is always a great general after the events at Putney Cromwell moved decisively against his two main enemies the Levellers and the King while Cromwell’s individual qualities came to the fore in this time it is undoubtedly that because he was apart of a rising and somewhat small social class that saw the King as an obstacle to its rise as rulers of England that he moved in the way he did. The debates at Putney if nothing else gave us proof that the ideas that were discussed there highlighted the actions different class forces. They gave us a documentary proof that contrary to the revisionist the main motor force in history is the struggle of contending class forces.

Notes

1. House of Lords Journal Volume 9 : 30th March 1647, Journal of the House of Lords Volume 9 1646 pp110- 116 URL http//www.britishhistory.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=37009
2. Antonia Fraser Cromwell Our Chief of Men
3. Letters from London- Sir William Clarke, The Clarke Papers. Selections from the papers of William Clarke volume 1 1901.
4. Online library of liberty Arthur Sutherland Pigott Woodhouse : Puritanism and Liberty, Being the Army Debates 1647-9 from the Clarke Manuscripts with Supplementary Documents.
5. Maximillian Petty and the Putney Debate on the franchise C Thompson Past and Present no 88 1980 pp 63-69.