My comments posted on "A Trumpet of Sedition" (Keith Livesey's blog) in recent years

 

Christopher Thompson

I want to make some points about a few recent posts on your blog, A Trumpet of Sedition. I am sure your readers will (or should) be aware that I am not a Marxist of any kind, so obviously, I am starting from a very different position. The rise of 'revisionism' in the early to mid-1970s was not, in my view, a response to a range of 'Conservative' political impulses. Its criticisms of Whig and Marxist explanations of the origins of the events of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles arose from the weaknesses of the arguments of Tawney, Stone, Hill and others over the 'rise of the gentry': 'revisionism's' advocates were from a variety of political standpoints - Russell was then a Labour Party supporter before becoming a Liberal Democrat: John Morrill was not a Conservative and, in the early-1980s, was a Social Democratic Party member: Kevin Sharpe was no Conservative either nor, of course, was an American like Mark Kishlansky. But one of the consequences of this shift in the period's historiography was the divorce between political and religious history on the one hand and economic and social history on the other.

It persists if one, for example, reads Henry Reece's recent book on the fall of the Protectorate and the demise of the Rump in the period from 1658 to 1660. There is not much trace of it either in the recent studies of Oliver Cromwell's life. John Walter had some very important comments on this subject to make in the Huntington Library Quarterly in 2015. Nonetheless, the interaction between economic and social developments and political and religious history in the British Isles under the Stuarts cannot, in my opinion, be entirely neglected. These factors interact without the former determining the latter, as some believe.

I would also like to make two further caveats. London, which appears to be the major focus for radical activities, was not England, and historians who focus on the capital seem largely oblivious to the strength of the bonds between landowners and their tenants, neighbours and allies. There were complex local arrangements for dealing with bargaining over complaints from people below the landed elites for resolving problems in local and county communities, which do not appear to have been appreciated very much since the time of Peter Laslett and the CAMPOP group. Despite the late Lawrence Stone's claims, there is a case to be made that the position of the landed 'aristocracy' strengthened markedly in the early to middle of the seventeenth century. This is one of the factors that rendered the idea of a 'revolution' or, if one prefers, a 'bourgeois revolution' untenable. A 'great uprising, 'un grand soulevement', failed.  

Mateo Ballester Rodriguez, Los Ecos de un Regicidio.La Recepcion de la Revolucion Inglesa y sus Ideas Politicas en Espana (1640-1660)

 By Chris Thompson

How the events of the 1640s and 1650s and their consequences are to be assessed is one of the enduring issues that historians of the British Isles have to face. The analysis of their varying interpretations is in itself a subject of continuing interest. By and large, historians based in these islands and in English-speaking countries overseas have shown less interest in and devoted less time to the studies undertaken by historians, by historical sociologists and political scientists in other countries. Nonetheless, such studies do exist and throw an interesting light on how these events were seen and are now interpreted elsewhere.

Mateo Ballester Rodriguez’s essay published in 2015 is one such example. It is partly a bibliographical description of the limited printed publications that appeared in the Iberian peninsula and the apparently exiguous manuscript material dealing with the conflicts in England in the period from 1640 to 1660. But it has some opening remarks by Rodriguez himself on the significance of the disputes over sovereignty in England and some further remarks covering the observations of figures from the world of political science on the same subject. Many of the latter like Liah Greenfeld or Hans Kohn or John Breuilly have not appeared on my horizon before.

Rodriguez’s formulation of his own analysis is relatively straightforward. He held that there was a struggle between the supporters of traditional beliefs in the divine rights of monarchs who stood at the apex of English society and the adherents of novel ideas about the location of national sovereignty in the institution of Parliament. On the whole, Anglicans and Catholics supported King Charles I while radical Puritans were committed to religious toleration and thus to Parliament’s cause.Absolutist political theorists like Thomas Hobbes were rejected by advocates of legal equality like the Levellers and, later, by John Locke. Admittedly, the conflicts of the first and second Civil Wars divided English people of all ranks but Parliament’s victory on the battlefields ensured that the new concept of authority resting in the nation and embodied in Parliament was secured. Kings and the Church of England were disposed of. One or two echoes of Christopher Hill’s work were clearly reflected.

Liah Greenfeld apparently argued that the idea of the nation as the repository of political authority, as the basis of political authority and the object of loyalty was first embraced in England during its Revolution. Hans Kohn came to the view that the Revolution represented the first example of modern religious, political and social nationalism. On the other hand, John Breuilly thought that it was difficult to make the nation the repository of the principle of sovereignty or to figure out how that principle could be institutionally embodied in the Rump and the Parliaments of the Protectorate. In any case, the phenomenon disappeared when political stability was re-established after the Restoration in 1660. Very little of the intriguing and intense debates in the British Isles ever found their way into the hands of the subjects of the Iberian Habsburgs in print or in manuscript as Rodriguez went on to show. Ideological considerations and the practice of self-censorship undoubtedly played a part in this outcome even though, in Holland and Venice, interest in such events was much more obvious.

It is tempting to criticise some of these contentions. How far printed publications in the British Isles reflected the balance of contemporaries’ opinions is difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine. Highly interesting though they are, the views of groups like the Levellers and Diggers may not be as indicative of wider political opinions as their admirers in more modern times believe. Puritans were not in any event all of one kind nor were they uniformly advocates of religious toleration. All the regimes in England after 1646, in Scotland and Ireland after 1651 depended on military force to remain in power. Once the confidence of the soldiery was lost and the supporters of Protectoral or republican rule became too divided, the return of monarchical rule and of the pre-1640 state churches was increasingly likely. Historical sociologists and political theorists alike need to look more closely at the historical evidence before they venture onto the turf of historians. 

 

Comment: Ed Simon’s review of Jonathan Healey’s book, The Blazing World Los Angeles Review of Books. August 31, 2023

Christopher Thompson

Every now and then, Google’s alert system turns up unexpected results. Yesterday was a case in point when I was made aware of Ed Simon’s review of Jonathan Healey’s relatively new work, The Blazing World: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972). Echoes of that seventeenth-century world in songs and poetry can still be heard according to Simon even though its theological disputes, puzzling political arrangements and problematic scientific theories remain difficult to explain to modern readers. Nonetheless, as Healey explained and Simon agreed, this world had been transformed by 1700 by the growth of trade and consumption, the development of political parties and the press, the appearance of coffee houses, concert halls and theatres. But it had its obverse side too in the spread of liberal scientific positivism and religious pluralism, in the growth of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade and the beginnings of a market view of the world that may yet prove apocalyptic as the record of the start of the industrial revolution powered by coal buried in the ice cores of the Antarctic shows. The period and the book thus have important implications for the world in which we now live.

 For support for these contentions, Simon appealed to Christopher Hill’s book, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, published in 1972. Hill’s study encompassed a range of groups like the Levellers and Diggers, the Ranters, the Seekers and Familists, who were participants in an alternative, abortive Revolution that never happened but with which Hill found sympathy. Even so, Hill was inclined to regard these groups as crypto-liberals disguised as religious sectaries whereas the truth was the other way round. But right now, the liberal underpinnings of the state, of the sovereignty of the individual and the need for the market are being seriously challenged from the left and the right in our time. The seventeenth century is over but it is not yet done with us if Ed Simon is correct. 

There is no doubt that Stuart England in 1700 was profoundly different from Tudor England in 1600. Its economy like its trading and colonial links had been transformed: it had reached constitutional and legal arrangements, political and religious settlements that transcended the quarrels of the mid-seventeenth century. Its public finances had been transformed and it had become a military and naval power comparable to any in Europe. It was recognisably a modern society on its way to becoming the most advanced country in the world for just over a century and a half. That the legacy of these developments are still apparent in the modern world is quite another matter altogether. 

Behind these disputable propositions, there is another, more serious issue at stake. There is no doubt either that the events of the 1640s, i.e. of the English Civil Wars or Revolution or, as more recent historiography has it, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, appeal particularly to people with radical political convictions. 

The idea of an older order being overthrown, of traditional forms of government and rule collapsing, of novel ideas about how states should be run or economies and societies organised , and the appearance of groups dedicated to these ends has had an enduring attraction. Sitting in great archive depositories and libraries - in the Huntington Library in San Marino or the Bodleian Library in Oxford or the British Library in London - it is all too easy to forget the immense suffering that followed from these ‘grands soulevements’: many lives, human and animal, were lost; many thousands of people were maimed; the destruction of property was on a huge scale; in England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, old institutions were torn down; military power supported successive regimes from 1646 until the Restoration in 1660. 

A terrible price was paid for the political and religious speculations, the constitutional and legal quarrels of the 1640s and 1650s which ended not as Christopher Hill would have liked in rule by tiny groups of sectaries and radicals but in what turned out to be the victory of the Royalists. Blair Worden’s verdict on these conflicts was fundamentally right. Imputing responsibility to the issues that preoccupy modern societies and current thinkers to the outcome of struggles in seventeenth-century England is a fallacious argument. No such lessons can legitimately be drawn.

 

16 July, 2023

First of all, let me make it clear that I am not now and never have been a "revisionist". I am actually a critic of the work of Conrad Russell, work which I believe to be fundamentally wrong although not for the reasons Mr Sturza holds. Secondly, he will find in Valerie Pearl's 1961 book on the City of London from 1625 to 1643 careful research that shows that the violence in the streets of London reported in Royalist news books was more carefully controlled and organised than figures like Brian Manning or Christopher Hill believed.

(The fall of the Bastille in Paris is irrelevant in this context.) I have indeed read Mr Sturza's book which offers a commentary based on secondary works rather than original research into the sources for the early-1640s.   The protagonists on both sides in the events of the 1640s were drawn from all sections of English (and Welsh) society but this was not a "class-based" society in the Marxist sense at all. 

The English Civil Wars were 'un grand soulevement' - 'a great uprising' in English - more analogous to the revolt of the Low Countries post-1566/7, to the French Wars of Religion from 1562 to 1598 and the Frondes of 1648-1653 and the Revolt of the Catalans in 1640 rather than to any Marxist paradigm based on the Russian Revolution of 1917. Mr Sturza is perfectly entitled to elaborate his hypothesis but it has almost no credibility amongst contemporary academic historians. He may be surprised too to learn that I am not a reactionary in any sense.

Commentary on The London Revolution Review

I am afraid that Sturza’s account of the events of the 1640s and your analysis of its merits (and faults) is not correct, Keith. First of all, the historiography of this period is wrong. The problems with a materialist or Marxist explanation were apparent well before the rise of so-called ‘Revisionism’ in the mid-1970s. The debates over the fortunes of the gentry between Tawney and Stone on one side and Trevor-Roper and J.P.Cooper on the other had stimulated a raft of research into the condition of landowners In many counties across England but also the growth of county studies and the hypothesis first advanced by Alan Everitt about the importance of localism in the ensuing conflicts.

John Morrill cut his historical teeth in this area and has never, to my knowledge, subscribed to the view that the English Civil War or Revolution came as a bolt from the blue.) In Cambridge, the work of Peter Laslett and the CAMPOP group called into very serious question whether any classes in the Marxist sense existed at all.

The idea that capitalist merchants and farmers had come by 1640 to find themselves temporarily aligned with the interests of artisans and peasants against the Caroline regime, which was Christopher Hill’s view in 1940, does not hold water if only because the early Stuart monarchs were keen on promoting economic innovation, new industrial inventions and overseas trade: if you look at the papers of Lionel Cranfield or Arthur Ingram (or those of Sir John Bankes in the Bodleian Library), you will see what I mean.

There is certainly no evidence whatsoever that, as a result of the events of the 1640s and 1650s, the rule of one class was replaced by that of another, whatever Ann Talbot claimed. The larger landowners were predominant after 1660 as they had been before 1640. (W.R.Emerson’s account of the growth of large landowners’ fortunes is better than that of Lawrence Stone in 1965 or 1972.) Nor should it be forgotten that Valerie Pearl and Keith Lindley have shown how closely aligned the groups in the Long Parliament were to their allies in the urban area of London: mob activities and riots were much less important than figures like Hill or Manning, or Sturza supposed.

Furthermore, London was not the entire kingdom: beyond its bounds, there were important groups of supporters of the Long Parliament in counties, towns and villages, just as there were neutrals and supporters of the Royalist cause. The links between landowners, their tenants, allies and supporters in the countryside were critical too in the Long Parliament’s military victories by 1646 and the period between 1648 and 1651.

I should add that Christopher Hill did not fail to take on the ‘Revisionists’. If you look at his Open University A203 course, England: A Changing Culture 1618-1689 (Block 3, Pp.72-78), you will see one of his attempts to reply to Conrad Russell’s post-1975  work. In fact, ‘revisionism’ had a long pre-history stretching back into the 1960s and was over by the early-1990s. It was not the product of a capitalist attack on the working class, nor did it have any links with Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan’s political views. This contention is completely untenable. 

Similarly, the grounds for thinking that what happened in the British Isles or in England in the 1640s was a ‘bourgeois revolution’ are not tenable. Those events can be more clearly seen as comparable to the revolt of the Low Countries or the French Wars of Religion in the second half of the sixteenth century, the revolts of Portugal and Catalonia in 1640 or the Frondes in France in the years between 1648 and 1653. ‘Les grand soulevements’ in these places and times never fitted into the framework postulated by Marx, Engels and their successors. Marx et al. asked interesting questions but their answers were never convinced.

C Thompson

 Inside and Outside Academic Life

 Every day when I look at the internet in general and at Twitter in particular I come across independent scholars writing about their own research and writing and the problems they face outside the academic environment in which they have been trained. Most of them are very well qualified with doctorates or other advanced degrees but have found themselves unable to gain jobs in universities or colleges. This is partly the result of universities awarding more advanced degrees and thus producing more candidates for a relatively restricted number of prospective posts. It also has the effect from the point of view of employers of gaining a wide degree of choice in appointments and of keeping salaries lower because of the competition for posts. Having experienced this situation in the past myself, I have every sympathy with the predicament of those with a vocation for academic work but who must endure the frustration of being unable to secure appropriate work. 

For this reason, I was interested to see Dr S.J.Ainsworth’s suggestion on Twitter in the middle of April asking if anyone might be interested in forming a network of independent scholars.[1] I have tried in the past to suggest a similar idea with the creation of a website offering items of news on early modern subjects, details of jobs that have become available, links to sites with academic articles (like CORE), to repositories for theses (like the  DART-etheses portal), to databases (like the Internet Archive), and other facilities like discussion forums, audio and video recordings, reviews of books, early modern blogs,  etc. Admittedly, such a project would need in my view at least half a dozen people to be committed to contributing and making it successful over a period of time. I have made an overture detailing these suggestions to Dr Ainsworth and shall be interested to get a response. 

The news that Aston University and the South Bank University of London will both be abandoning the teaching of history courses in the autumn makes positive action to bridge the gaps between academics teaching the subject and those outside their ranks more urgent. One of my long-standing friends has, as I have mentioned before, expressed his apprehension that history may not survive as a discipline in higher education in the foreseeable future. I do understand why accountants, administrators and politicians find business courses, science and technology courses so appealing: the demand for them is obvious in the interests of the development of modern economies. Politicians often view higher education as a primary instrument for feeding the growth of this and other countries economies. More growth means more resources in tax revenues which they can then use to re-allocate to objectives they approve of. The humanities, including history, serve no such obvious purpose. But history is the major discipline for explaining how we in this society have come to be where we are and the appetite for historical knowledge is immense. Phasing it out of higher education institutions would be self-defeating and highly damaging to a civilized society. 

Joe Saunders’s account of the British Association of Local History’s discussion of the Civil War in the Localities held on 19th April[2] makes this point very effectively since it attracted an audience of just over 180 people. Dr Charlotte Young and Tim Hasker made a presentation that clearly engaged the interest of those attending and stimulated some intriguing questions. The only puzzling feature was the local bibliography on county histories that cited works by R.C.Richardson, Alan Everitt, Ann Hughes, Anthony Fletcher, John Morrill, David Underdown and William Hunt, all of them by now somewhat long in the tooth. But county histories, pace the recent work by Richard Cust and Peter Lake on Cheshire, has been out of fashion for a considerable period of time.

 

[1] https://twitter.com/S_J_Ainsworth/status/1382613368180211712

 

[2] https://www.balh.org.uk/blog-report-from-local-history-hour-the-english-civil-war-in-the-localities-2021-04-19

 

Ann Hughes’s paper to the Dugdale Society’s Conference held on 16th May, 2021 on the subject of studies of counties during her academic career 

I spent part of yesterday morning watching and listening in to Ann Hughes’s comments on the transformation of county studies in the period up to and including the English Civil War during the course of her academic career. She had been an undergraduate and then a postgraduate at Liverpool University where she completed a doctoral thesis on Warwickshire before moving on to the Open University, to Manchester University and then to Keele University where she occupied a professorial chair until her retirement.  In the course of her talk, she paid tribute to the influence of the late Brian Quintrell and reflected on the evolution of county studies since the 1960s. 

Early work tended to be focused on the role of the gentry within counties, work that illuminated the lives of the gentry as a landed elite and which contributed to understanding the administrative, constitutional and political activities of local governors within such a framework. J.T.Cliffe’s work on the Yorkshire gentry was a good example of the first kind and Tom Barnes’s study of Somerset between 1625 and 1642 exemplified the second.  Her slightly older contemporary, Robin Silcock (like Brian Quintrell’s unpublished study of Essex) evaluated the record of King Charles I’s period of personal rule and how this contributed to the causes of the English Civil War. 

Hughes herself was less influenced by localist approaches emphasising the introspection of county communities and the importance of local interests reacting to central pressures. Alan Everitt’s work on Kent was of this kind but rather less important to her than David Underdown’s study of Pride’s Purge. She did not believe that a rigid central-local analysis was helpful and, in any case, there were areas within counties where the focus would not necessarily be on the gentry. The work of John Walter and others on popular politics and culture suggested interaction between different social groups. These contrasting approaches, she believed had resulted in a victory for her contemporaries amongst historians as the collection published by Jackie Eales and Andrew Hopper in 2012 showed. 

The focus of county studies had now changed. There was more attention now to the consequences of the civil war, on, for example, casualties, on memories, and on trauma as the work of David Appleby and Andrew Hopper at Leicester showed. She did, however, have some doubts about the level of casualties in the period and thought that the exhilaration and excitement of a radicalised revolution needed to be taken into account. Like other historians too, she had moved on beyond 1660. There had been important work by Simon Osborne on popular politics in the midland counties, on cultural differences – most importantly by Mark Stoyle under the inspiration of Underdown, on communications, personal relationships and religion. Peter Lake’s works on Northamptonshire with Isaac Stephens and, later with Richard Cust, on Cheshire, testified to this change and to an interest in micro-history. 

But the most stimulating way in her view of looking at the Civil war lay in the notion of state formation: this had been little noticed in the 1970s and 1980s but Michael Braddick’s work had brought it to wider attention. State formation had been driven by internal conflicts rather than by foreign wars. This had occurred at a time of political fragmentation and was recorded in the growth of self-conscious documentation. Warwickshire was particularly well-documented at county, city and parish levels as local communities responded to the demand of central authority, i.e. of Parliament. Their accounts and reports were shaped by local concerns nonetheless as the bills from one of Coventry’s parishes showed. 

She was now looking at the ambiguities of the wartime English state where the records illustrated the cost to local inhabitants of the free quarter for soldiers, of damage to the environment, e.g. in the loss of trees, and how narratives of the conflict would be made richer. Individuals’ senses of identity had been affected as the experiences of George Medley, gardener, civilian and soldier, showed: he had been employed as a gardener before becoming a relatively well-paid soldier. Ann Hughes was now involved in working with Andrew Hopper on the Greville family accounts and on the evidence they provided for consumption and household links. 

In answer to questions, Ann Hughes elaborated on some of the points she had made earlier. She was now working on the Gell family of Hopton in Derbyshire and the archive of sermon notes they had kept over three generations. A book, moreover, on the career of the 2nd Lord Brooke would, in her view, be extremely useful. As far as Alan Everitt’s work was concerned, his assessment on the politics of Kent reflected the view of the centre: he had too readily considered the county as cohesive and had been unable to accept that the late-1648 petition demanding justice against the King was genuine. In fact, as Jackie Eales had shown, it was associated with a radical group in the county. William Dugdale’s work on Warwickshire was, however interesting and multi-faceted it proved to be, the partisan account of a Tory Royalist looking back at the events of the Civil War. Her conclusion was that, in the 1640s and 1650s, roles could be blurred and identities become fragmented. 

I found this talk very interesting and certainly concur in thinking that Brian Quintrell was a much under-recognised and important figure in early modern historiography. In one sense, studies of counties initially grew out of the ancient controversy over the fortunes of the gentry as an arena in which competing hypotheses could be tested as the studies by Joyce Mouseley, Gordon Blackwood and others showed. Like Ann Hughes, I found Alan Everitt’s 1968 study of Kent as an illustration of provincial insularity and localism improbable: no such phenomenon could be found in medieval Kent. But it did have some appeal and, to a degree, influenced the study of the Eastern Association by Clive Holmes: John Morrill’s study of Cheshire was, in part, a response to it. Where I differ from her analysis can be found in two unmentioned gaps in her analysis. It did not touch upon the collapse of the ‘good old cause’ by 1660, on the divisions that grew between the military victors themselves and on the failure of post-1646 regimes to secure widespread consent to their rule. More important still is the point that the post-1660 Stuart regimes were not, in my view, effectively engaged in state formation: they were fiscally and militarily weak by comparison with France or even with the Dutch, a weakness only remedied after 1688/1689. She is, of course, entitled to express her view as, indeed, am I.

 

Christopher Thompson