Waseem Ahmed on Jonathan Healey's book

 Waseem Ahmed’s review of Jonathan Healey’s book, The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England (Counterfire. 19 October, 2023)

Waseeem Ahmed is probably best known for his current postgraduate work at University College, London on the politics of the Interregnum between 1649 and 1660 and for his role in organising the recent conference at the Institute of Historical Research on the impact and influence of Christopher Hill’s book, The World Turned Upside Down. It is, therefore, no surprise that his review of Jonathan Healey’s work, The Blazing World, is generally laudatory, praising its assessment of the transformation of English society in the seventeenth century and its synthesis of detailed academic research and sound analytical judgment. Healey’s view of early-seventeenth English society as fractured and subject to economic and social changes -e.g. In the rise of the gentry and the middling sort, political and religious polarisation, disputes over the location of sovereignty, etc - is one he endorses since they helped to make possible the events and outcome of the Civil Wars. The struggles of the late-1620s with successive Parliaments over royal demands for supply and King Charles’s preference for Arminianism in the Church were the prelude to the relative calm of the 1630s, a period brought to an end by the King’s attempt to impose a Laudian church settlement of Scotland in 1637 precipitating the revolt of the Covenanters and, because of military failure to suppress this revolt, the end of the Personal Rule and the recall of England’s Parliament in 1640. Waseem Ahmed found Healey’s emphasis on the role of ordinary men and women in general and of the London crowd in particular in driving radical change in national politics in 1640-1642 welcome. As the apparatus of the State and Church collapsed, all sorts of radical ideas in religion and politics came to be expressed in the open as traditional beliefs and institutions came to be challenged. Healey has much to say of interest about the evolution of the new groups - Levellers and Diggers, Baptists and Quakers - in this period and to establish the revolutionary nature of the English Revolution. Charles I’s execution in 1649 established the point that the nation’s ruler was accountable to its people. But he was less comfortable with Healey’s analysis of the 1650s as a period of a gradual move back towards a monarchical restoration. In what appears to be a reference to his own research, Waseem Ahmed suggests that individuals were prepared to accommodate themselves to the regimes of the Commonwealth and Protectorate and that, even when Oliver Cromwell died in the autumn of 1658, there was little sign of a return to royal rule. Nonetheless, there was no return to the situation before 1641 and the dissenting tradition along with popular political culture remained central to English life long after 1660 even when political and religious conflicts diminished after the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689. Healey’s work signals the return of the revolutionary credentials of the mid-seventeenth century to its rightful historiographical place.

This summary of Waseem Ahmed’s review is, I hope, a reasonably accurate and fair one. It has a number of characteristics of interest. First of all, it reflects an older historiographical tradition to be found in the works of figures like Brian Manning and, most notably, in those of Christopher Hill. There is, moreover, no doubt that there had been important social and economic changes in England before 1640. The rise in the population of England and Wales from c.1520-1530 provided a critical stimulus to food production and to the re-shaping of rural hierarchies. Landowners generally, including the peerage, gained from this process. Similarly, there was a very significant growth in overseas trade to the Levant and the Indian subcontinent as well as to the newly established colonies in the Caribbean and North America. Literacy levels for men and women rose. Networks of communications improved as did the dissemination of news within the country. The evangelization of the population under Queen Elizabeth left a legacy of hostility to Catholicism and to Catholic powers that neither King James VI and I nor King Charles I could mitigate whatever the demands of their foreign policies. The latter’s support for Arminian doctrines on free will and the ‘beauty of holiness’ rendered him vulnerable to the charge of crypto-Catholicism. Signs of the spread of religious dissent and seditious political views were evident well before 1640 even if the warning signs were not fully heeded by the Caroline regime. The financial exigencies faced by the Crown between 1625 and 1629 gave members of the House of Commons and some peers the opportunity to seek redress of their grievances in return for prospective supply. But there was a retreat from a willingness to bargain on the part of the King and his supporters that could be seen then and continued after 1630 when foreign military adventures ceased. The proto-revolutionary crisis of the late-1620s has escaped Waseem Ahmed’s attention as it appears to have done that of Jonathan Healey. It is, in fact, possible to trace how the leading critics of Caroline rule began to consider using armed force against Charles I in the mid-1630s.

It has been very difficult to regard the activities of the London crowds in the early-1640s as entirely spontaneous since Valerie Pearl’s work was published in 1961. Mass petitioning of Parliament went back to the Presbyterian movement of the 1580s. The heretical religious views that Christopher Hill thought so novel in the 1640s could be found in the records of the Church courts well before then. So, too, could the seditious political propositions of many of the pamphleteers of the 1640s in the records of the Assize Courts. What was new was their open expression in print form and in the public activities of radical groups and religious sects. Of course, it is highly interesting and intellectually stimulating to see the sources where these views can be found. But no one sitting in the British Library, in the National Archives, in the Bodleian or Cambridge University Libraries or in county record offices should forget the immense human suffering, the destruction of property, the damage to established institutions and values that the wars of the three kingdoms brought in their wake.

Equally clearly, the reality was that, after the end of the first Civil War in England and Wales in 1645-1646 and after the conquests of Scotland and Ireland in 1649-1651, the incumbent regimes of the Commonwealth and Protectorate rested on military force. Naturally enough, those under their rule had to be careful to accommodate themselves to this de facto situation. Expressions of open hostility were rare. But that did not mean that there was no undertow in any of the kingdoms towards more traditional forms of government in Church and State. Support for the post-1649 republic and the subsequent Protectorate was very limited. Once the New Model Army’s leaders fell out with one another and their restricted and divided body of followers, the return of Stuart rule was increasingly likely.

Arguing that antecedent economic and social developments along with political and religious quarrels made the English Revolution highly likely is one thing. It can be recognised as a form of Marxist or sub-Marxist determinism. Arguing that the Restoration of 1660 was, in essence, an unfortunate accident caused by the failings of radical nerve is quite another. Neither seems plausible in my view. 

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