PREFACE

And thus I hope even British respectability will not be overshocked if I use…the term “historical materialism,” to designate that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another.

~Frederick Engels1

The diminishing band who continue to write about the period have largely discarded the grand narratives of liberty and revolution. They no longer believe that two sides in the war were divided by great differences, whether social or ideological. Clear-cut interpretations of the conflict have given way to a complex and confusing story of contingency, accident, and unintended consequences.

~Keith Thomas2

The history of the English Revolution, Civil War, unsettled Commonwealth and degenerating Protectorate took place during the years 1640-1660. The period remains a divisive line in English history, despite less notice being taken of it in British schools and the popular press than was the case not so long ago. Just as the effects and controversies of the American Civil War are still extant, those of the English Civil War in Britain (and also Ireland) remain alive today.3 “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner famously wrote, “it’s not even past.” By abolishing slave labor in favor of capitalist wage labor, the defeat of the Southern plantation owners made the U.S. Civil War the last progressive bourgeois revolution to occur. Two hundred years earlier, the English Revolution destroyed the absolutist feudal political system in the British Isles. The epoch of capitalist society under the rule of the bourgeois class had begun, even if only tentatively. The issues at stake in the struggles of 1640 and after were not only whether sovereignty, that is, political power, resided in the monarch or Parliament; or whether there would be freedom of religion, how much and for whom; but whether the entire social and political system would be modified to allow for a greater possibility of better living for the masses, and the greater democracy needed to achieve it.

The Magna Carta of 1215 had led to a monarchy attenuated by a Parliament, and the 1530s Reformation of Henry VIII denuded the Church of its eternal inviolability. These rich traditions imbued the English events with a political and religious background that simultaneously encouraged and misled the aroused populace. The issues they fought over, what we today call democratic rights, would eventually be codified in the 1689 Bill of Rights, and the initial amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Their origins, however, lie here in the mid-17th century.4

The great French Revolution is conventionally considered the start of the modern, i.e., capitalist, age. The English Revolution, in comparison, was an even more ambiguous, partial, and contradictory affair. This complexity was captured by the socialist Oxford historian R. H. Tawney, who when asked whether the English Civil War was a bourgeois revolution replied, “Of course it was a bourgeois revolution. The problem is the bourgeoisie was on both sides.”5 Unlike France in 1789, during the 1640s in England there were no scenes in Parliament declaring feudalism abolished wholesale, no Terror unleashed against the aristocracy, no land redistributed to the peasantry. And while Oliver Cromwell was as iron-willed and decisive as Robespierre in pursuit of the military defeat of the king, he was a most inconsistent revolutionary in its aftermath.

Thus the prominent issues of the period, and the way they were resolved at the time, continue to give rise to fierce partisan debate. Many historians, beginning with the royalist Earl of Clarendon, have been unhappy with the way matters turned out, or, with a jaundiced eye on current political conflicts, wished to deny the revolutionary nature of the changes that occurred.6 Particularly over the last fifty years, as the post-WWII order has been slowly crumbling, the topic once again became extraordinarily contentious among historians, necessarily reflecting the political leanings of the contenders. As one rightwing Revisionist historian put it, “We are all at heart either Royalists or Roundheads.”7 By the early 1980s, Revisionist historians had virtually drowned out the Marxist class analysis.

What many historians (both pro and con) regarded as the Marxist view of English events was predominant in British academia during the mid-20th century. Its prevalence was largely due to the efforts of the English historian Christopher Hill. His very short first book, The English Revolution 1640,8 provides a concise analysis that completely rejects and replaces the portrayals of his predecessors, whether royalist, Tory or Whig (liberal).9 To one degree or another, bourgeois historiography told a Civil War story of politicized religious fanatics who first aided and then usurped Parliament’s fight for democracy, murdered the king, and established an aberrant theocratic state.10 Hill presented the Revolution and Civil War as a conflict between social classes. Underlying his oeuvre was the basic Marxist tenet that the ideas and outlook of individuals were firstly impacted by their economic position, and he identified the petty bourgeois rural yeomen and urban artisans as the social basis of Parliament’s New Model Army.11 All attempts to study this period must begin with Hill’s work.

A member of the Communist Party from 1935-1957, Hill was prolific, turning out numerous essays and reviews in addition to major interpretive studies, most of which are still in print or available. Much of his work concentrated on the more radical and democratic aspects and individuals of the general Puritan movement. In particular, he revived interest in the “far left,” i.e., most radical, separatist religious sects, especially the early communist Gerrard Winstanley, leader of the Diggers.12 His most thorough exposition of such groups is The World Turned Upside Down.13 If he bent the stick too far in his imputation of revolutionary potential to such forces this was a small price to pay for demonstrating their influence on 17th-century society and later political thought. Hill also used the cultural history of the period to illuminate it in a broader context. His book The Century of Revolution 1603-1714,14 spanning the entire Stuart era, remains the best introduction to the topic, although in one or two places it strays from the earlier analysis of The English Revolution 1640, to take account of some conservative historical claims current at the time.

While The Century of Revolution unavoidably treats many events in brief, more unsatisfactory is Hill’s scant mention of the initial revolution in London described here.15 This singular omission is also true of his similar work, published a few years later, Reformation to Industrial Revolution 1530-1780,16 an even wider-ranging, somewhat more leisurely introductory social history centered around the Civil War period. Both of these are basic texts, invaluable for their high-level and comprehensive view of the era, but notably lacking in material on the 1640-1643 mass movement in London.

It is necessary to bear in mind that Hill’s politics had been formed in a party loyal to Moscow at a time when it was moving in an overtly reformist direction under Stalin (known as the “popular front” period).17 Thus he saw Danton, rather than Robespierre, as Cromwell’s later historical analog,18 and he regarded the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and February 1917 as bourgeois rather than workers’ revolutions, despite the presence of councils (soviets in Russian) formed by workers and soldiers.19 It is never easy to learn that the political tool for one’s aims and ideals has been found wanting. Without an understanding of why and how the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution degenerated, not a few ex-Communists arrived at a cynical view of “the god that failed.” Hill was very far from these, but he did make a certain peace with bourgeois academia. His post-1957 writings, erudite and valuable, lack his earlier militant edge, while remaining informed by his political past.

Of greatest consequence was the view Hill and Tawney held in the 1940s and ‘50s conflating a misconstrued “progressive gentry,” with the bourgeois revolutionary leadership.20

Professor R. H. Tawney and others have analyzed the cleavage within the landed class, between what Marxists would call “feudal” and “bourgeois” elements, which developed in the decades before 1640 and which underlay the divisions in the civil war.21 [Emphasis added]

Tawney’s purposeful but flawed 1941 essay, “The Rise of the Gentry, 1558-1640”22 kicked off a major, but inconclusive, academic controversy over the gentry that lasted into the early 1960s. Hill’s view of a progressive gentry, distinguished from its “feudal elements,” often cited Tawney’s work, but was schematic to begin with. On the one hand, the basis for this distinction within the gentry was unwarranted — land in the 17th century was no longer governed by feudal economic relations, however much feudal rank and patriarchal attitudes continued. On the other, it collapsed any disparities between two different classes, the gentry and the rapidly developing bourgeois, or capitalist, class that were acting in concert. This collapse flowed from Tawney’s assertion that “The landowner living on the profits and rents of commercial farming, and the merchant or banker…represented, not two classes, but one. Judged by the source of their incomes, both were equally bourgeois.”23 Although commercial leasing of farms by the upper class was far from unknown at the beginning of the seventeenth century, copyhold tenantry was still preponderant, and a source of wide conflict.

Pressed by anti-Marxists, Hill began to retreat from the notion that a section of the gentry had led the revolution.24 But he appears to have been unable to present any good alternative to it, despite Valerie Pearl’s seminal account of the London revolutionary bourgeois leadership in her 1961 study.25 Forced to acknowledge the untenability of his position,26 the muddied argument left Hill open to attacks pointing to an alleged lack of clear-cut class divisions in the anti-absolutist struggle.27 By 1974, and again in 1980, he attempted to answer his critics by one-sidedly stressing the revolution as an objective fact or unconscious process.

…the phrase [bourgeois revolution] in Marxist usage does not mean a revolution made by or consciously willed by the bourgeoisie. … The English revolution, like all revolutions, was caused by the breakdown of the old society… The hypothesis is that this outcome, and the Revolution itself, were made possible by…the structures, fractures, and pressures of the society, rather than the wishes of leaders, which dictated the outbreak of revolution and shaped the state which emerged from it. … Once the old constraints had broken down, or been broken, the shape of the new order was determined in the long run by the needs of a society in which large numbers of unideological men minded their own business.28 [Emphasis in original]

His opponents further seized on this as a blow to Marxist theory, as indeed it was.29 It is flesh and blood human beings who make history, and revolutions, at least successful ones, don’t occur without a leadership.

So who did lead the revolution in London? Puritan clergy played a considerable role, and well-off middle layers of the guild memberships were drawn into it by events, but the key answer comes from Robert Brenner’s convincing work on the free-trading Atlantic merchants in his study Merchants and Revolution.30 This book was not published until 1993, although a 50-page article by Brenner on the topic was published twenty years before in Hill’s own journal.31 While Hill was clearly aware of the importance of this new group of English merchants to the post-Civil War regimes,32 he appears never to have commented on their leading political role during the 1630s and early 1640s.33 He did recommend Brenner’s book, along with those of others, in the preface to a reissued edition of his essays,34 but if he reviewed or wrote about it in the last decade of his life I am unaware of it. Even in retreat he could elegantly refute conservative critics at times, but he was a poor polemicist, too polite and too often advancing weak or vague arguments. Nevertheless, he supplied a comprehensive explication of the period that in fact very largely holds up. His great credit was in pointing out and stubbornly adhering to the enormous advances made as a result of the revolutionary decades, and his identification of ordinary people from the lower classes brought into active political life. More than anyone else he astutely asserted, not least through repeated analyses of Puritan ideology, the understanding of the mid-17th century events as a social revolution, in place of a religious or “Puritan” revolution.

During the 1940s and 1950s Hill had to contend with conservative historians, particularly Hugh Trevor-Roper.35 Beginning in the 1970s, however, a more deliberate backlash began. Geoffrey Elton had provided an inverted paradigm in 1965,36 but it was Conrad Russell (son of Bertrand by his third wife and later 5th Earl Russell) who first attracted wide attention. Like Elton, he attacked what was alleged to be the prevailing Marxist orthodoxy of a “high road to civil war,”37 i.e., that it was inevitable. “Before we explain why the English Revolution happened, we should ask again whether it ever did happen,” Russell wrote in 1974.38 To pose the question this way was to take aim at, not just an interpretation, but the complex of facts themselves.

Much of Russell’s broad account…rests on the claims that virtually all Englishmen believed in ‘the rule of law’ and that no profound differences of political principle divided them before the Civil War. … For Russell and Elton, virtually everyone held that the country was a limited monarchy. Since there was practically no dissension on this question, the war could not have been about it.39

Russell’s challenge was soon taken up by an increasingly reactionary group of younger historians self-consciously calling themselves Revisionists. With the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and the political wrench toward conservatism in 1980, this tendency gathered steam, heaping scorn and calumny upon any work even hinting at a class analysis, or indeed any analysis at all. “Revisionism was a revolt against materialist or determinist histories and historiographies…” wrote an English participant much later, “…a rejection of the social history of politics but also a rejection of the relevance of social change.”40

Attempts to summarize trends or generate theory were denounced as illegitimate inventions, divorced from and imposed on facts in hindsight.41 Events occurred only by accident or coincidence, or at most because of free-standing choices made by high-ranking individuals: “‘the people who count,’ to use Mark Kishlansky’s phrase.”42 Such a focus by reactionaries like Kishlansky was a deliberate attempt to eliminate class conflict. Any exception to general trends could be used to invalidate social analysis, and of course one could always be found. With so much turmoil in widely different parts of the country during that time only localized studies had any reliability or legitimacy, they claimed.43 Within the field,

…revisionism became more than an interpretation of a particular time and place in history; it laid claim to a way of doing history. And it is as a methodological agenda rather than as a particular version of events that revisionism has enjoyed the greatest influence.44

As such it was primarily a pragmatic effort to find some way to counter the Marxist philosophy of history. E. H. Carr described the view that, “Knowledge is knowledge for some purpose. The validity of the knowledge depends on the validity of the purpose,”45 and the Revisionists’ purpose was perfectly clear. Their virulent repudiation of revolutionary history led to, as John Morrill admitted, a colleague once congratulating him for “‘explaining why no civil war broke out in England in 1642.’”46

One method Revisionists attempted was to invert historical reality:

…Parliament was not gaining in importance but was actually becoming less important; the court was not politically insignificant compared with Parliament but was actually more significant than Parliament; the Crown’s opponents were not innovators but were actually conservatives; and so on.47

As David Underdown noted, some Revisionists heavily stressed an alleged consensus within the ruling class:

By marginalizing the parliamentary texts and defining the Court as the only public arena worthy of study, the earlier revisionists were able to depict a political nation that until 1640 was almost universally deferential and harmonious, and then suddenly exploded in rebellion. We might perhaps call this the big bang theory of the Civil War.48

With their heads in the sand, many Revisionists argued there was no relationship between the Parliaments of 1604-1629 and 1640,49 disparaging any attempt to offer a synthetic account. “Is it right to assume, as always seems to be assumed, that a long-term, overall explanation is necessarily called for?”50 Behind Peter Laslett’s innocent-sounding question lies a sneer and a falsehood: that all history is merely a matter of events that happen to happen. “Conflict is a common enough form of social interaction,” he maintained, “there is nothing special about the things that bring it about.” 51 Perry Anderson rightly ascribed this to the “one-damn-thing-after-another view of the past.”52 The eminent historian of English agriculture, Joan Thirsk, could have been writing in answer to this sophistical assertion in a 1977 review:

Economies, small or large, compete with one another, make demands on each other, and thereby drive each other to adopt new economic expedients having their own distinctive social repercussions. This constitutes the dynamic process of economic and social change. And the historian’s herculean task is to trace and describe ever more exactly this perpetually spiraling movement, which carries distinctive regional economies forward along fresh paths, partly at their own choice, partly under the force of circumstances created outside them.53

The “herculean task” of local or regional studies can produce rewarding results, but they cannot by themselves answer the question of what caused the English Civil War; nor did early Revisionists try to.

…revisionism directly challenges the assumptions of the traditional schools in all of its key arguments: a rejection of teleological history; a refusal to accept uncritically the role of ideas and ideology as carriers of political principle (focusing instead on personality, faction, patronage, and high politics); a denial of long-term causation rooted in social or economic change. The revisionist view of seventeenth-century England sees a world where…order, unity, and consensus were the dominant political values…54

To support their atomization of history Revisionists attempted to substitute various constructs to blame for the Revolution: bad decisions by the king; the court’s conflicts with some of the nobles; either the unimportance of the House of Commons (!) or its alleged unanimity; the local interests and/or opportunist appetites of MPs; or, later, religious enthusiasm,55 thereby imitating the Whig narrative of a “Puritan revolution.” Whatever kernels of truth existed here or there, these feeble or exaggerated explanations uniformly excluded any view of revolution, eliminating the possibility of any coherent progress whether in political or economic history.

Any attempt to replace the model of a consensually unified, early modern world-view with one containing meaningful differences, even self-conscious opposition, will soon draw a revisionist charge of anachronism: forcing modern categories onto a premodern society. Revisionists rigorously police contemporary historical writing for interloping modern phenomena, social models, and schemes of analysis. … This prerogative rigor regarding terminology and concepts aims not to keep the empirical discussion of historical change from starting off on the wrong foot, but to throttle it in its crib.56 [Emphasis in original]

An example of the narrowness of the Revisionist outlook was described in a 2012 review:

“Politics” is absent from [poet John] Milton’s deeply political oeuvre because, for [Blair] Worden, politics is synonymous with the constitution. For Worden, it is only when Milton began writing explicitly about constitutional matters…that he became a political writer.57

A particular travesty in their campaign of vilification is their common amalgamation of the Whig and Marxist viewpoints, seeing the latter as only a more militant or more superficial version of the former, a conflation that became all too generally accepted.58 That both Whigs and Marxists posit certain teleological views of history does not make them the same. Quite the contrary, there is an epic gulf between the condescending bourgeois nationalism of Whigs, with their mystical talk of “national character” and “spirit of the times,” versus the historical materialist, egalitarian internationalism of Marxism. “…the word materialism grates upon the ears of the immense majority of British readers. ‘Agnosticism’ might be tolerated, but materialism is utterly inadmissible,”59 Engels wrote at the end of the 19th century. The liberal historian Lawrence Stone neither claimed nor was ever considered to be a Marxist, but Revisionists attacked him because he “adapted” Marx in his defense of a revolutionary view. Their inflated claims to have thus refuted Marxism were at best self-delusion.60

Revisionist historians certainly argued among themselves, but the tendency as a whole was only able to exist and become predominant due to the harsh rightwing program of strikebreaking and union-busting by Thatcher and Reagan, and the consequent body blow to the working class caused by de-industrialization, implemented by each country’s ruling capitalists. In their desire to support this reactionary program, Revisionism rushed to extend conservative ideology into history itself. (A similar academic trend developed in France attacking the class analysis of the French Revolution.)61 The collapse of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR in 1991 set off an orgy of triumphalism by the imperialist powers, making it appear that Marxism and communism had “failed.” In fact, despite its qualitative bureaucratic deformation, the Soviet Union had remained a fortress against the unrestrained imperialist mayhem that occurred after its fall. At the same time, though the heirs of Stalin in Moscow falsely claimed the mantle of the Russian Revolution, the obvious noncapitalist operation of the economy and society, along with, for example, the dissemination of the works of Marx and Lenin, left an imprint for all the struggling, exploited and oppressed laboring peoples of the world to look to. Cromwell’s Protectorate played a similar role, for a shorter time, with regard to royalism.

The Revisionists had their effect, however, and they are not the only ones who seek to undersell the revolutionary nature of the period. With few exceptions, mainstream historians of all persuasions today regard the Marxist paradigm as disproven and unuseful.62 This is largely based on the erroneous idea that Marxism constitutes “economic determinism,” a purely objectivist accusation, which is treated as little more than a secular version of Calvin’s predestinarianism.63 Had it actually been so, the revolutionary classes would presumably never have suffered any defeats. “It should be noted that it was the Puritan ministers who did most to popularized (sic) teleology by insisting that their ‘cause’ was precisely what revisionist scholars deny it was: predestined.”64

The Revisionist charge that Marxism reduced events solely to economics, and ignored purely political factors, is almost funny applied to the most consequential, and most feared, political movement in two different centuries. If there was reductionism at work, it was the Revisionists who were busy at it. No serious person could imagine giving credence to such a truncated, mechanical and linear method, and neither did Marx and Engels. Once the shibboleth of determinism is disposed of the enormous contributions of the 20th century leftwing historians come into focus.

The Marxist understanding of the English Revolution and Civil War as the result of a class conflict that overthrew the feudal political system and brought the bourgeoisie to power is correct.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.65

Those circumstances are firstly dictated by the technical level of a given society. They are the context that all economic and social interactions, of any kind, take place in, and no individual, organization, party, movement or class can escape from it. We may wonder at the advances of modern science, but those advances are also the limitations that modern society operates within.

History does have a materialist base for Marxists but this does not mean that extra-economic or non-material forces can be ignored. In fact, the Marxist approach compels one to analyze social forms as totalities and to integrate economic with non-economic factors.66

This contradicts the normal bourgeois method of examining historical phenomena in isolation from each other. For Marx and Marxists, social classes are defined by their role in the economic production of goods. They are historically evolved structures one is born into, and may or may not (more often not) be able to transcend, depending on the obstacles and opportunities in a particular society.67 The types of goods a society produces, who labors (or doesn’t) to produce them, under what conditions and for whose benefit, must be the prerequisite questions for any historian. All other social, cultural, and ideological trends must be carefully analyzed in this light, otherwise history becomes a disembodied, idealist construction. “The intellectual historian may (at his risk) pay no attention to economics, the economic historian to Shakespeare, but the social historian who neglects either will not get far.” The understanding of the foundational aspect of economics was quite common among Continental European historians prior to WWII.68

That the bourgeois revolution occurred as it did in 17th century England was not foreordained; it could have developed differently (just as it did in France). But since it did develop as it did, tracing the historically specific, long-term process offers the best method to understand it. The snobbish focus of Revisionists on social consensus is merely a smokescreen. Whether open or not, there are always frictions and antagonisms in a class-divided society, even within classes. Their argument is a self-evidently conservative bias to reinforce the political status quo. In actuality, people simply make the best lives they can within the social system under which they live. It is therefore not the ordinary day-to–day workings of a society that are the most momentous, necessary as it is to understand these, but the exceptional, unordinary events that disturb its tranquility, often in complicated ways. Revolutions occur when the social class that rules society is overthrown by a lower class, permanently realigning the economic and legal systems to suit the requirements of the new ruling class. Such turnovers are progressive when they facilitate, sooner or later, an unmistakably higher level of economic production, and a corresponding expansion of political freedom. The Revisionists’ opposition on principle to the idea of history as a process voids this essential aspect, substituting a very static, laboriously atomized view that directs their work; one that is simply unable to explain how or why societies change over time.

The purpose of the current work is to resurrect the events of the early to mid-17th century in England, centered in and around London, and examine the development of the factors that constituted those events a revolution. In the process how the young English class of bourgeois entrepreneurs grew, and came to replace the feudal monarchy and aristocracy in power, will be shown. Much as Marx sketched out,69 one of the unique factors in England’s case, enabling the bourgeoisie’s advance, was an alliance between its vanguard elements, and a section of the aristocracy whose interests paralleled its own. The London mass movement and its bourgeois leadership

carried out a revolution in London itself. The municipal revolt of 1641–1642 involved no mere replacement of “ins” by “outs.” The citizen militants shattered the old oligarchic constitution; in the process, they achieved at least a partial transformation in the social foundations of political power in the City.70

In revolutionary politics, it is the relationship of forces, most decisively class forces, that is ultimately determinative. “The test of any such analysis is not whether or no it sounds convincing, but whether it helps to interpret the facts and solve some of the problems which confront the historian…”71 The social class analysis meets the criteria of scientific hypotheses: it cogently accounts for the known facts in the simplest way possible. This does not imply that there are no other contributing (or detracting) factors, that leading individuals have no importance, or that there is nothing more to be discovered or said. The clash of unfolding events offers a sufficient number of contradictions to unravel, and it is in these events that the subjective factor of history comes to the fore. (In Part Two of The Century of Revolution, covering 1640-1660, Christopher Hill reversed the order of his chapters, putting “Politics and the Constitution” ahead of “Economics.”) What economic class analysis provides is a fundamental explanation of historical dynamics on which to build, a guide to evaluation, which is exactly what the Revisionists (and conservatives before and since) are at such pains to attack and discredit in their hurry to fragment events, and write mass action (and even Parliamentary action!) out of history.

To establish the thesis I have relied mainly on Marxian or leftwing historians whose contributions, all too often, have been largely ignored, dismissed, or distorted by bourgeois detractors who would prefer to forget or explain away the revolutionary origins of their own class history.72 Critically read, these left historians go a long way toward solving the puzzle that was the English Revolution. From their work I have attempted to build a coherent account, reinforced where applicable by a wider selection of writers, few of whom would likely be sympathetic to my viewpoint. It behooves me to acknowledge the overwhelming amount of material that exists on this subject, not always accessible or affordable by a non-academic such as myself. Much of it would doubtless help flesh out and refine what is essentially an elaborated outline.

My own argument rests on 1) the contradictory social position of the reforming gentry in the House of Commons, and 2) the critically important component of the revolutionary London Puritan leadership provided by the free-trading bourgeois Atlantic merchants. The first argument redresses a flaw in the writings of Christopher Hill, described above, of which prodigious advantage was taken by his opponents; the second refutes those modern day historians who claimed, as a result of this weakness, that the bourgeois class was either “missing” from the Marxist description of the English revolution, or was uniformly conservative.73

Certainly in America, and perhaps also Britain today, an educated and/or politically aware audience is unlikely to be familiar with even the major events of this time, fascinating and original as they are.74 (See the high-level time line in the Appendix for reference.) Whereas the vast majority of historical writing concentrates on the House of Commons, this book seeks to provide the most detail in regard to the actions of the masses, and the political changes that occurred in London in 1641-1642, surely the least well-known aspects of the revolution. “…most histories tended to treat such [popular] interventions as incidental to the real history of the period…”75 It was the radically Puritan petty bourgeois artisan craftworkers, shopkeepers, early manufacturers, domestic traders, and mariners who provided the horsepower of the revolution, and not the moderate gentry. As with all “history from below,” the “common people” tend to be the least documented76 and written about,77 but it is the participation of these sectors as a body, more or less consciously led, and in support of a program incompatible with feudal social relations, that indeed constitute these events a revolution. However, in the lead-up to and early conduct of the Revolution and Civil War, a section of the reformist gentry in the House of Commons inarguably played a very considerable role, for better and worse, in tandem with the petty-bourgeois popular movement in London. Their activities therefore cannot in any way be ignored. In this fact resides the partial nature and short-term failure of the revolution in these decades, and the hybrid result of the revolution in 1688.

A truly useful understanding of the English Revolution is impossible without regard to the history which led to it. The much debated issue over many decades, in and out of the Marxist movement, of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England would ideally be the place to start. That extensive topic, however, is properly outside my scope, and would require a separate study of its own.78 So let us initially just observe that

…gradually from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries a change began to come over the structure of this agricultural community. The food and wool from the village began to sell far afield: the spinsters and the husbandmen were turned into commodity-producers for a national market.79

One feature beyond debate is the sudden rise in economic activity that occurs in the second half of the 16th century. After a brief review of some earlier formative events in England’s history, it is here that our story must really begin.

1 Introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1892, 1970), 386-387

2 “The Truth About Oliver Cromwell,” New York Review of Books 59, no. 17 (November 8, 2012), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/nov/08/truth-about-oliver-cromwell Accessed June 20, 2013

3 In 2016, Her Majesty’s government argued in court that foreign affairs were the royal prerogative! Stephen Castle, “Without a Constitution, ‘Brexit’ Is Guided by a Prerogative. But Whose?,” The New York Times, October 16, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/world/europe/without-a-constitution-brexit-is-guided-by-a-prerogative-but-whose.html?searchResultPosition=1 Accessed April 25, 2017

4 In 2015, the spate of articles in the popular press insisting on the irrelevancy of Magna Carta at its 800th anniversary only further demonstrated how at least a major section of the bourgeois class had freed itself from any moral compunctions regarding the welfare and rights of the people at large, so much so that it spit on a primary source of its own history. See e.g., Tom Ginsburg, “Stop Revering Magna Carta,” The New York Times, June 14, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/15/opinion/stop-revering-magna-carta.html?searchResultPosition=1 Accessed June 15, 2015. Cf. Ferdinand Mount, “Back to Runnymede,” London Review of Books 37, no. 8 (23 April 2015), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n08/ferdinand-mount/back-to-runnymede Accessed 1 July 2016 for a more mainstream, Tory view.

5 Christopher Hill, “Conclusion,” in Change and Continuity in 17th-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974, 1991), 281; R. C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 124

6 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, an advisor to both Charles I and II, wrote the first history of the Revolution and Civil War.

7 Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution, 239, quoting Kevin Sharpe, who “…sided relentlessly with the people in power.” David Cressy, “The Blindness of Charles I,” Huntington Library Quarterly 78, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 640, 653, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hlq.2015.78.4.637 Accessed February 13, 2019

8 Christopher Hill, The English Revolution 1640 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940, 1985). Also available at Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution/index.htm Accessed 15 May 2016

9 Hill wrote it just before he went to serve in WWII, in case he did not return.

10 This view began as official Restoration state policy with the 1660 Act of Indemnity and Oblivion. “The conflict and the Commonwealth were to be seen as an aberration, an eclipse…” Jesse Childs, “Reduced to Ashes and Rubbage,” London Review of Books 41, no. 1 (3 January 2019), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n01/jessie-childs/reduced-to-ashes-and-rubbage Accessed 18 January 2019

11 Hill, 1640, 59, 62, 63

12 The Diggers, or True Levellers, were poor people who attempted to plant crops on common or unused land. They were easily and cruelly attacked and dispersed.

13 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1980)

14 Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution 1603-1714 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961, 1980)

15 Hill, Century, 102-103

16 Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1967, 1992)

17 The “popular front” (aka “people’s front”) was (and sometimes still is) a collaboration between capitalist and reformist workers parties for electoral purposes, running on a common, watered-down, i.e., non-revolutionary, program acceptable to the bourgeois elements in it.

18 Christopher Hill, “Political Animal,” New York Review of Books 24, no. 10 (June 9, 1977), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1977/jun/09/political-animal/ Accessed September 15, 2013

19 Christopher Hill, “The English Civil War Interpreted by Marx and Engels,” Science & Society 12, no. 1 (Winter 1948): 135, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40399879 Accessed 20 November 2016

20 Hill, 1640, 29, 35, 38, 54, 59; Century, 87; Christopher Hill, “Lord Clarendon and the Puritan Revolution,” in Puritanism and Revolution (London: Pimlico, 1958, 2001), 192. This was despite Hill’s own earlier statements: “But the House of Commons did not make the revolution: its members were subject to pressure from outside, from the people of London, the yeoman and artisans of the home counties.” 1640, 52; “The House of Commons elected in the autumn of 1640 was not a revolutionary assembly. Elected on the traditional propertied franchise, the M.P.s were a cross-section of the ruling class.” Oliver Cromwell 1658-1958 (London: The Historical Association, 1958), 12. Reprinted in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill Vol. 3 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981, 1986)

21 Christopher Hill, “Historians on the Rise of British Capitalism,” Science & Society 14, no. 4 (Fall 1950): 308, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40400023 Accessed 15 December 2016

22 The Economic History Review 11, no. 1 (1941), http://www.jstor.org/stable/2590708 Accessed 20 November 2016

23 Tawney, “Rise of the Gentry,” 18 [Emphasis in original]; Hill, Century, 87

24 Christopher Hill, “Recent Interpretations of the Civil War,” History 41, nos. 141, 143 (February, October, 1956): 70-71, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24402908 Accessed 25 April, 2020. Reprinted in Puritanism and Revolution (London: Pimlico, 1958, 2001)

25 Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1961). Hill’s avoidance of the London events is especially odd given that Pearl’s book, published the same year as Hill’s The Century of Revolution and listed in its bibliography, was based on her Ph.D. thesis reportedly supervised by Hill. Her thesis is cited in Oliver Cromwell 1658-1958, 13 fn. 9. The reprint in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill Vol. 3 cites Pearl’s book instead.

26 Christopher Hill, “Parliament and People in 17th-Century England,” Past & Present, no. 92 (August, 1981): 101, 118, http://www.jstor.org/stable/650751 Accessed 26 November 2016. Revised and reprinted in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill Vol. 3. See the section in Chapter 7 below “The English gentry, an anomalous class.”

27 See J. H. Hexter, “Storm Over the Gentry” (1958), and “Personal Retrospect and Postscript” (1961), in Reappraisals in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 117-162, 255-258; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (London: Verso, 2003), 640-641; Henry Heller, The Birth of Capitalism: A 21st Century Perspective (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 119, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt183p671.8 Accessed 16 December 2018

28 Christopher Hill, “A Bourgeois Revolution?,” in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 110-112, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7zvts5.7 Accessed 25 April 2020. Reprinted in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill Vol. 3 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980, 1986); Hill, “Conclusion,” 279. See also David Underdown, “Puritanism, Revolution, and Christopher Hill,” The History Teacher 22, no. 1 (November 1988): 69-71, http://www.jstor.org/stable/493099 Accessed 22 November 2017

29 See in particular the slippery article by the liberal Lawrence Stone, “The Bourgeois Revolution of Seventeenth-Century England Revisited,” Past & Present, no. 109 (November 1985), http://www.jstor.org/stable/650609 Accessed 10 August 2015

30 On the Atlantic merchants see Chapter 8 below. Hill himself had mentioned a distinction between “big trading bourgeoisie” and “free-trade bourgeoisie”. 1640, 59

31 Robert Brenner, “The Civil War Politics of London’s Merchant Community,” Past & Present, no. 58 (February 1973), http://www.jstor.org/stable/650257 Accessed 19 November 2016. For the magazine’s history see Christopher Hill, R. H. Hilton, and E. J. Hobsbawm, “Past and Present. Origins and Early Years,” Past & Present, no. 100 (August 1983), http://www.jstor.org/stable/650618 Accessed 10 August 2015

32 Hill, Reformation, 156-157

33 The closest reference Hill seems to have made about the Atlantic merchants prior to the Civil War is a comment in passing: “A break-through came with a combination of religious dissidents (Puritan and Catholic) as settlers [in North America] with sympathetic merchants who were prepared to forego immediate profit…” Christopher Hill, “Plain Sailing,” New York Review of Books 21, no. 18 (November 14, 1974), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1974/nov/14/plain-sailing/ Accessed September 15, 2013

34 Christopher Hill, “Preface to the Revised Edition,” A Nation of Change and Novelty (London: Bookmarks, 1993), 11

35 Who once denigrated the Civil War period as “an untidy interruption.” Robert Ashton, “The Civil War and the Class Struggle,” in The English Civil War and After 1642-1658, ed. R. H. Parry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 93

36 Geoffrey Elton, “A High Road to Civil War?” reprinted in Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government: Papers and Reviews 1946-1972 Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Robert Zaller, “The Concept of Opposition in Early Stuart England,” Albion 12, no. 3 (Autumn 1980): 220-223, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4049254 Accessed 25 February 2019

37 Conrad Russell, “Parliamentary History in Perspective 1604-1629,” History 61, no. 201 (1976): 2-3, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24409552 Accessed 26 December 2016; Robert Zaller, “What Does the English Revolution Mean? Recent Historiographical Interpretations of Mid-Seventeenth Century England,” Albion 18, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 618-620, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4050133 Accessed 11 November 2018. Zaller, “The Concept of Opposition,” 223-228

38 Conrad Russell, “Was there an English Revolution?: The Rump Parliament, 1648-1653,” The Times Higher Education Supplement, 8 March 1974, quoted in J. C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution (London: Methuen & Co., 1977), 146

39 Johann Sommerville, “English and European Political Ideas in the Early Seventeenth Century: Revisionism and the Case of Absolutism,” Journal of British Studies 35, no. 2 (April 1996): 170, https://www.jstor.org/stable/175798 Accessed 13 May 2019; Peter Lake, “From Revisionist to Royalist History; or, Was Charles I the First Whig Historian,” Huntington Library Quarterly 78, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 676 fn. 63, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hlq.2015.78.4.657 Accessed December 20, 2019; Mark E. Kennedy, “Legislation, Foreign Policy, and the ‘Proper Business’ of the Parliament of 1624,” Albion 23, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 41-42, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4050541, Accessed 1 August 2019

40 John Morrill, “Revisionism’s Wounded Legacies,” Huntington Library Quarterly 78, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 577, 583, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hlq.2015.78.4.577 Accessed February 13, 2019; John Walter, “Kissing Cousins? Social History/Political History before and after the Revisionist Moment,” Huntington Library Quarterly 78, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 703, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hlq.2015.78.4.703 Accessed June 6, 2019; John Sanderson, “Conrad Russell’s Ideas,” History of Political Thought 14, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 85, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26214422 Accessed 31 December 2018; Anthony Milton, “Arminians, Laudians, Anglicans, and Revisionists: Back to Which Drawing Board?” Huntington Library Quarterly 78, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 729, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hlq.2015.78.4.723 Accessed February 13, 2019; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 644-647. See also Derek Hirst, “Of Labels and Situations: Revisionisms and Early Stuart Studies,” Huntington Library Quarterly 78, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 596-598, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hlq.2015.78.4.595 Accessed April 2, 2019

41 This spurious argument was anticipated in a furious 1975 attack on Hill by Hexter. See William G. Palmer, “The Burden of Proof: J.H. Hexter and Christopher Hill,” Journal of British Studies 19, no. 1 (Autumn 1979), https://www.jstor.org/stable/175685 Accessed 19 April 2020

42 Tim Harris, “Revisiting the Causes of the English Civil War,” Huntington Library Quarterly 78, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 618, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hlq.2015.78.4.615 Accessed December 31, 2018

43 Thomas Cogswell, “Coping with Revisionism in Early Stuart History,” The Journal of Modern History 62, no. 3 (September 1990): 546, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1881176 Accessed 25 April 2019

44 Cynthia Herrup, “Revisionism — What’s in a Name?,” Journal of British Studies 35, no. 2 (April 1996): 137, http://www.jstor.org/stable/175796 Accessed 27 November 2016; Hill, “Parliament and People in 17th-Century England,” 101; John Kenyon, “Revisionism and Post-Revisionism in Early Stuart History,” The Journal of Modern History 64, no. 4 (December 1992): 692, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2124903 Accessed November 27, 2016

45 Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 31

46 Mary Fulbrook, “The English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt,” Social History 7, no. 3 (October 1982): 252, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4285188 Accessed 30 July 2019; Hirst, “Revisionisms and Early Stuart Studies,” 595

47 Milton, “Back to Which Drawing Board?” 724

48 David Underdown, A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 6

49 Charles I called no parliaments between 1629 and 1640. See the section in Chapter 7 below “Personal Rule of the 1630s.”

50 Peter Laslett, Forward to Hexter, Reappraisals in History, ix

51 Laslett, Forward, Reappraisals in History, x

52 Perry Anderson, “Maurice Thomson’s War,” London Review of Books 15, no. 21 (4 November 1993), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n21/perry-anderson/maurice-thomson-s-war Accessed 4 March 2019. See also David Underdown, “Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 by Robert Brenner,” Albion 26, no. 2 (Summer 1994), http://www.jstor.org/stable/4052332 Accessed 22 November 2017; Brian Manning, “The English Revolution and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism,” International Socialist Review 2, no. 63 (Summer 1994), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/manning/1994/xx/engrev.htm Accessed 1 June 2016

53 Joan Thirsk, “Economic and Social Development on a European-World Scale,” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 5 (March 1977): 1099, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2777816 Accessed October 12, 2018

54 S. K. Baskerville, “Puritans, Revisionists, and the English Revolution,” Huntington Library Quarterly 61, no. 2 (1998): 151, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3817796 Accessed November 11, 2018

55 Theodore K. Rabb, “The Role of the Commons,” Past and Present, no. 92 (August 1981): 59-60, https://www.jstor.org/stable/650749 Accessed 7 February 2019; Nicholas Tyacke, “Revolutionary Puritanism in Anglo-American Perspective,” Huntington Library Quarterly 78, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 746, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hlq.2015.78.4.745 Access May 30, 2019

56 James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London: Verso, 2002), 21

57 Phil Withington, “Past v. Present,” London Review of Books 34, no. 9 (10 May 2012), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n09/phil-withington/past-v.-present Accessed August 9, 2013. This is an insightful critique of essays by Blair Worden, Trevor-Roper’s protégé and literary executor.

58 “Was marxism ever anything more than whig history with statistics?” Glenn Burgess, “On Revisionism: An Analysis of Early Stuart Historiography in the 1970s and 1980s,” The Historical Journal 33, no. 3 (September 1990): 609-610, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2639733 Accessed 22 November 2018; “the long reign of Whig historiography and its Marxist variant…” Zaller, “The Concept of Opposition,” 220; Cogswell, “Coping with Revisionism,” 545

59 Engels, Introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 381

60 Morrill, “Revisionism’s Wounded Legacies,” 578-579, 582-583; Burgess, “On Revisionism,” 612

61 See Eric Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Bryan D. Palmer, “The Eclipse of Materialism: Marxism and the Writing of Social History in the 1980s,” Socialist Register 26 (1990): 121, https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5577 Accessed 14 November 2020

62 “But really, the important lessons had been learned by all, and at least down to the present, class war and the strangled triumph of liberal democracy are off the mainstream agenda.” Morrill, “Revisionism’s Wounded Legacies,” 592. “…the 1640s witnessed a bourgeois revolution; while it is of course possible to make such an argument…sharp criticism of this mode… has led to its near total disappearance from recent history.” Cogswell, “Coping with Revisionism,” 541. “…the long out of fashion notion that the English Revolution was a bourgeois revolution.” Buchanan Sharp, “The Place of the People in the English Revolution,” Theory and Society 14, no. 1 (January 1985): 104, https://www.jstor.org/stable/657400 Accessed 16 June 2019

63 Morrill, “Revisionism’s Wounded Legacies,” 582

64 Baskerville, “Puritans, Revisionists, and the English Revolution,” 157

65 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1852, 1970), 97

66 Jon S. Cohen, “The Achievements of Economic History: The Marxist School,” The Journal of Economic History 38, no. 1 (March 1978): 31, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2119314 Accessed 16 June 2019

67 This abbreviated description should not be taken to mean all classes in society are equally stable, carry the same weight, or remain internally unchanging over time.

68 Eric Hobsbawm, “From Social History to the History of Society,” Daedalus 100, no. 1 (Winter 1971): 21-22, 25, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20023989 Accessed 4 April 2020. Reprinted in On History (New York: The New Press, 1997)

69 Karl Marx, “A Review of Guizot’s Book ‘Why Has the English Revolution Been Successful?,’” in Marx and Engels On Britain (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1850, 1962), 347. A different translation, with the title “England’s 17th Century Revolution,” is at Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/02/english-revolution.htm Accessed 4 April 2017.

70 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 373

71 R. H. Hilton, “Capitalism — What’s in a Name?,” Past & Present, no. 1 (February 1952): 36, http://www.jstor.org/stable/649987 Accessed 7 December 2016. Reprinted in The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Verso, 1978)

72 “Manning had been working on The English People and the English Revolution, 1640–1649 for twenty years, but its appearance in 1976 meant that it was swept away by the flood tide of Revisionism.” Morrill, “Revisionism’s Wounded Legacies,” 584

73 See J. H. Hexter, “A New Framework for Social History,” in Reappraisals in History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,1979), 16; Zaller, “The Concept of Opposition,” 213-214

74 “The peak year for the study of history in Britain at A-level was 1976, when 149,000 students took History or Economic History. The number fell by roughly two-thirds over the next twenty years.” Dave Renton, “Marxists and historical writing in Britain,” Making History - Institute for Historical Research, 2008, https://archives.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/marxist_history.html Accessed 29 October 2019

75 John Walter, “The English People and the English Revolution Revisited,” History Workshop Journal, no. 61 (Spring 2006): 171, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25472843 Accessed June 15, 2019

76 To the singular far-sightedness of one George Thomason, Puritan bookseller and member of the Stationers Company, we owe a collection of 22,000 pamphlets and other materials from all sides published during the period 1640-1661, now in the British Library.

77 It is an indictment of bourgeois historiography as a whole that “The power and significance of this Committee [of Safety] in the early months of 1642 has never been commented on by historians.” Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 146. Twenty years earlier an American historian wrote, “One political problem after another remains insoluble because of our ignorance of what actually went on in the councils of the City.” J. H. Hexter, The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941, 1968), 95-96 fn. 76.

78 For a summary introduction to the historiography of the debate in the Marxist movement that began in the 1940s, see Heller, The Birth of Capitalism, 23-50. The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Verso, 1978) contains the original contributions to the 1940s-50s debate among Marxist academics, plus reprinted essays including: Hilton, “Capitalism — What’s in a Name?”; John Merrington, “Town and Country in the Transition to Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 93, (September/October, 1975), https://www.proquest.com/docview/1301995994/fulltextPDF/BB8F766F4E4741DCPQ/1? Accessed 23 September 2020. Among others on the topic see: E. J. Hobsbawm, “The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century” and “The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century — II,” Past & Present, no. 5, 6 (May, November 1954), https://www.jstor.org/stable/649822, https://www.jstor.org/stable/649814 Accessed 4 April 2020. Reprinted as “The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century” in Crisis in Europe 1560-1660, ed. Trevor Aston (New York: Anchor Books, 1967); Robert Brenner, “Dobb on the transition from feudalism to capitalism,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 2, no. 2 (June 1978), http://www.jstor.org/stable/23596403 Accessed 8 October 2015.

79 Hill, 1640, 21