Brian Manning on the English Revolution

An interesting afternoon spent listening to the late Brian Manning give a talk to a Socialist Workers' Party meeting on the subject of the English Revolution. Exactly when this happened is not clear but it can be heard on Youtube. His talk was admirably clear in its speech and equally clear in analysing a succession of interpretations of the events of the 1640s and 1650s. These involved a Whig or political interpretation of the period as a struggle for political liberty leading to the establishment of constitutional and Parliamentary liberties; a largely religious explanation of a struggle against the Church of England leading to the emergence of dissent and nonconfomity; and an economic interpretation entailing the decline of feudalism and the growth of capitalism. The overthrow of the monarchy (and execution of Charles I), the House of Lords and the Church of England were, in Manning's view, to have been welcomed. His emphasis was, however, on the growing gap in English society between rich and poor, the advantages accruing to the middling sort as their prosperity grew along with their political influence, however temporary in the 1650s, and the ensuing transformation of English society in a bourgeois direction. This is not a view I share, partly because his description of historiographical developments since the mid-1970s seemed flawed. No one historian in my recollection simply regarded the conflicts of the Civil Wars as the product of purely local quarrels nor did they straightforwardly write off all economic or social or other formulations relating to the composition of the competing forces. In any case, the combatants were not fixed entities over the post-1642 period and the bulk of the population was probably neutral. Even so, I do not entirely discount economic and social factors in explaining the origins, course and outcome of the conflicts of the 1640s. Nor do I think that they can be discounted in explaining the Restoration of 1660.