The relevance to what I’m doing is only obliquely related to ‘my project’ (and I have no idea why I get coy about mentioning it, but I do, although I doubt anyone reading this will cotton on to that). But as I am interested in history anyway, reading is a pleasure as much as anything else.
Before reading Devil-Land, England Under Siege 1588-1688 by Clare Jackson (reviewed here), I had already
I have no idea why it did not occur to me to write a review and I feel it is too late to do so now and still do the book justice.
I would have to read it again, and although I have nothing against that and often re-read books or chapters of them, I keep buying more books and to many stacked up to, to be read before I pop my clogs.
After Jackson’s book came one, God’s Englishman, Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution by historian Christopher Hill, which is more an account of Cromwell’s impact on his age than a straight biography of the man, and that was a bonus.
In passing, I note that I agree with Hill in calling what happened in the mid-17th century ‘a revolution’, that is not how most of us regard it.
After Jackson’s book came one, God’s Englishman, Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution by historian Christopher Hill, which is more an account of Cromwell’s impact on his age than a straight biography of the man, and that was a bonus.
In passing, I note that I agree with Hill in calling what happened in the mid-17th century ‘a revolution’, that is not how most of us regard it.
For better or worse, the notion of a ‘revolution’ will conjuror notions about the American Revolution (which initially was regarded as a civil war). Then there’s the French Revolution in 1789 and, a little under 130 years later Russia’s October Revolution or, for pedants, November Revolution.’
NB These days the ‘November Revolution’ usually refers to the eight months of civil upheaval in Germany, beginning on October 29 1918 with a mutiny in Kiel German Imperial Navy sailors and spreading in January 1919 increasingly there were street fighting between the hard-left and hard-right.)
What Hill calls the English Revolution concluded in 1660 with the restoration of a Stuart king, Charles II, and very soon ‘the ruling class’ and the ‘aristocracy’ regained the upper hand. Some might sniff pointedly and scoff ‘well, that was some revolution then, wasn’t it’. But they would be wrong, and how they are wrong is one of the themes of Hill’s book. In many ways it was a revolution.
For Hill (pictured right) the seventeenth century, not just in Britain but in Europe generally, was when the
‘medieval’ period in Western history finally ended and the modern age evolved, and I trust I am not being to broad-brush and misrepresent Hill when I write that.
More to the point for Hill, the period of James IV and I’s reign until the James II fled England was when the country’s economy went underwent far-reaching change, and he sees his ‘English revolution’ in social and commercial terms.
This is not surprising as Hill, who died in 2003 and had been brought up as a devout Methodist, was a lifelong Marxist and until the mid-1950s a member of the Communist Party (which he left in 1957, though not because of the invasion of Hungary in 1956, but because he felt there was ‘not enough democracy in the Communist Party). He was also, perhaps for some counterintuitively given his politics, Master of Balliol College, Oxford.
I first found Hill when I was googling for books about the English Civil Wars and came across his pamphlet (published by the Communist Party in 1940) The English Revolution 1640.
In it he outlines his thesis that the shift of power in England in many ways made a revolution likely. Its monarchs, from 1485, Henry VII, Henry VIII, Mary I, Edward VI and Elizabeth I, then James VI and I and his son were still powerful ‘absolute monarchs’ but increasingly more in theory and over following 150 years the power of the nobles slowly declined.
(Lady Jane Grey was queen for just ten days after the Duke of Northumberland persuaded the dying to Edward VI to name here as his successor and had married her to his second son a few months earlier. At first she had the support of the Privy Council, but it changed its mind when it realised how great was the support for Edward’s half-sister Mary.)
In those 150 years, England’s nobles lost much of their power and influence (and the older I get, and I’m closer to death than you, boys and girls, I feel very inclined to give the term quotation marks as we’ll as kings’, ‘queens, ‘upper class’ as I find the notions increasingly ridiculous’.
From 1006 on in the ‘medieval period’, apart from the monarch, the nobles and the church were the sole landowners and they called the shots regionally. Certainly they had to keep the monarch sweet, but they were very much the law, very rich and very powerful.
But as that period drew to a close and the economy matured, mercantile and professional interest became richer and wanted a greater say in matters. The church’s goose was then cooked by Henry VIII’s reformation and, pertinently, Thomas Cromwell’s plan for the dissolution fo the monasteries.
Yes, the reformation itself had its roots in new religious thinking, but Henry himself, a spendthrift and invariably broke, just wanted to get his hands on the church’s loot.
It is this shift to commercialism and the rise of a professional ‘middle class’ – and the slow decline in agrarianism – which Hill suggests were major factors in the evolution of British society. Of course, over the following four centuries this trend had continued. Arguably, what with AI, various new fantastical and dangerous money-raising wheezes and the rise of the right, it is continuing and entering a new phase..
As it was, I read Hill’s pamphlet before I knew about his Marxist convictions and thought he made a very good case indeed. And I still think in many ways he is on the right track. But not in all.
I feel that the concept of ‘cause and effect’, perhaps present in Hill’s account, can be misleading if we are not careful. It works well in the sciences: add an acid to an alkali – the cause of a reaction – and we get a salt and water – the effect. In history, however we should tread very gingerly indeed.
I am certainly not suggesting Hill is being as one-tracked, but when we read history, most of us are in danger of becoming ever more simplistic and thinking in primary colours. So were you to ask Brits (and others) what the English Civil Wars / the English Revolution were about, you will get any number of answers, all supplied with absolute certainty and all just providing is a fragment of the overall picture.
Responses would be along the lines of ‘establishing democracy’ and ‘establishing a strong parliament of the people’, ‘puritanism / presbyterianism / religion’, ‘getting rid of the monarchy’, ‘no taxation without representation’ and so on.
That’s what you might read in Dick ’n Dora’s / Janet ’n John’s Guide To English Civil War [sic] and none, in my take, was every a prime or even secondary reason for the the descent for five years into a bloody conflict which, frankly, resolved very little.
That second claim is intended to be understood as ‘there were no prime reasons’. Yes, Charles was beheaded, but that was not what many wanted or were aiming to do, and many on the parliamentary side opposed his execution. Quite soon the House of Commons itself was at each others’ throats, not least the ‘puritans’ and the ‘presbyterians’.
As for ‘establishing democracy’, for about ten years before Charles II was invited back to become king, far from being democratic, England became something of a military dictatorship. But even that last statement must be qualified: that dictatorship evolved and it, too, was not planned.
Relevant might be the attitude and demands of many ‘commoners’ on the winning side when the fighting was finally over which many today would find admirable: the ‘Levellers’, who had the support of a great deal of Cromwell’s New Model Army, wanted universal suffrage – the vote for everyone, including women – and the more radical Levellers, known as the ‘Diggers’ wanted the abolition of property rights and the distribution of land.
That did not go down at all well with the rural gentry, and they were buggered if they were going to let it happen. So it didn’t.
This account of the egalitarian mood which was appearing is not just that of the Marxist Hill, either – in his book Braddick also recounts that these demands were made.
NB These days the ‘November Revolution’ usually refers to the eight months of civil upheaval in Germany, beginning on October 29 1918 with a mutiny in Kiel German Imperial Navy sailors and spreading in January 1919 increasingly there were street fighting between the hard-left and hard-right.)
What Hill calls the English Revolution concluded in 1660 with the restoration of a Stuart king, Charles II, and very soon ‘the ruling class’ and the ‘aristocracy’ regained the upper hand. Some might sniff pointedly and scoff ‘well, that was some revolution then, wasn’t it’. But they would be wrong, and how they are wrong is one of the themes of Hill’s book. In many ways it was a revolution.
For Hill (pictured right) the seventeenth century, not just in Britain but in Europe generally, was when the
More to the point for Hill, the period of James IV and I’s reign until the James II fled England was when the country’s economy went underwent far-reaching change, and he sees his ‘English revolution’ in social and commercial terms.
This is not surprising as Hill, who died in 2003 and had been brought up as a devout Methodist, was a lifelong Marxist and until the mid-1950s a member of the Communist Party (which he left in 1957, though not because of the invasion of Hungary in 1956, but because he felt there was ‘not enough democracy in the Communist Party). He was also, perhaps for some counterintuitively given his politics, Master of Balliol College, Oxford.
I first found Hill when I was googling for books about the English Civil Wars and came across his pamphlet (published by the Communist Party in 1940) The English Revolution 1640.
In it he outlines his thesis that the shift of power in England in many ways made a revolution likely. Its monarchs, from 1485, Henry VII, Henry VIII, Mary I, Edward VI and Elizabeth I, then James VI and I and his son were still powerful ‘absolute monarchs’ but increasingly more in theory and over following 150 years the power of the nobles slowly declined.
(Lady Jane Grey was queen for just ten days after the Duke of Northumberland persuaded the dying to Edward VI to name here as his successor and had married her to his second son a few months earlier. At first she had the support of the Privy Council, but it changed its mind when it realised how great was the support for Edward’s half-sister Mary.)
In those 150 years, England’s nobles lost much of their power and influence (and the older I get, and I’m closer to death than you, boys and girls, I feel very inclined to give the term quotation marks as we’ll as kings’, ‘queens, ‘upper class’ as I find the notions increasingly ridiculous’.
From 1006 on in the ‘medieval period’, apart from the monarch, the nobles and the church were the sole landowners and they called the shots regionally. Certainly they had to keep the monarch sweet, but they were very much the law, very rich and very powerful.
But as that period drew to a close and the economy matured, mercantile and professional interest became richer and wanted a greater say in matters. The church’s goose was then cooked by Henry VIII’s reformation and, pertinently, Thomas Cromwell’s plan for the dissolution fo the monasteries.
Yes, the reformation itself had its roots in new religious thinking, but Henry himself, a spendthrift and invariably broke, just wanted to get his hands on the church’s loot.
It is this shift to commercialism and the rise of a professional ‘middle class’ – and the slow decline in agrarianism – which Hill suggests were major factors in the evolution of British society. Of course, over the following four centuries this trend had continued. Arguably, what with AI, various new fantastical and dangerous money-raising wheezes and the rise of the right, it is continuing and entering a new phase..
As it was, I read Hill’s pamphlet before I knew about his Marxist convictions and thought he made a very good case indeed. And I still think in many ways he is on the right track. But not in all.
I feel that the concept of ‘cause and effect’, perhaps present in Hill’s account, can be misleading if we are not careful. It works well in the sciences: add an acid to an alkali – the cause of a reaction – and we get a salt and water – the effect. In history, however we should tread very gingerly indeed.
I am certainly not suggesting Hill is being as one-tracked, but when we read history, most of us are in danger of becoming ever more simplistic and thinking in primary colours. So were you to ask Brits (and others) what the English Civil Wars / the English Revolution were about, you will get any number of answers, all supplied with absolute certainty and all just providing is a fragment of the overall picture.
Responses would be along the lines of ‘establishing democracy’ and ‘establishing a strong parliament of the people’, ‘puritanism / presbyterianism / religion’, ‘getting rid of the monarchy’, ‘no taxation without representation’ and so on.
That’s what you might read in Dick ’n Dora’s / Janet ’n John’s Guide To English Civil War [sic] and none, in my take, was every a prime or even secondary reason for the the descent for five years into a bloody conflict which, frankly, resolved very little.
That second claim is intended to be understood as ‘there were no prime reasons’. Yes, Charles was beheaded, but that was not what many wanted or were aiming to do, and many on the parliamentary side opposed his execution. Quite soon the House of Commons itself was at each others’ throats, not least the ‘puritans’ and the ‘presbyterians’.
As for ‘establishing democracy’, for about ten years before Charles II was invited back to become king, far from being democratic, England became something of a military dictatorship. But even that last statement must be qualified: that dictatorship evolved and it, too, was not planned.
Relevant might be the attitude and demands of many ‘commoners’ on the winning side when the fighting was finally over which many today would find admirable: the ‘Levellers’, who had the support of a great deal of Cromwell’s New Model Army, wanted universal suffrage – the vote for everyone, including women – and the more radical Levellers, known as the ‘Diggers’ wanted the abolition of property rights and the distribution of land.
That did not go down at all well with the rural gentry, and they were buggered if they were going to let it happen. So it didn’t.
This account of the egalitarian mood which was appearing is not just that of the Marxist Hill, either – in his book Braddick also recounts that these demands were made.
In fact, the danger from Leveller supporters in the army – who, note well, were armed – was deemed so serious that as far as possible they were neutralised by being deployed in Ireland, ostensibly to keep rebellion down, tacitly to get them and their ‘dangerous’ ideas out of England.
It is a sad truth that, as seems to happen at then of all revolutions, that the old ‘ruling’ class is not defeated, just refreshed, with its values surviving. In Protectorate England men who had fought well in the Civil Wars were raised in status, received land and were thus bumped up several social notches, a position they – understandably? – jealously guarded.
Here are two observations which might be relevant. There’s the French saying
Hill’s book, God’s Englishman, is about Oliver Cromwell, and I seems I have so have mentioned him very little. It’s time to make amends.
What kind of man Cromwell was, will depend upon who you ask. Although he became a member of the House of Commons in 1628, just for a year as the cack-handed fool Charles II dissolved Parliament in 1929, he was still insignificant.
He was born into the middling sort of rural gentry but then was largely down on his luck until he was re-elected in 1640 when Charles needed money and was forced to ask Parliament for it. It was only when fighting eventually broke out that one of Cromwell’s core talents was revealed: fighting and leading mean into battle.
Later, once the fighting had ended, it became apparent he had another useful talent, one for politics, and in the ongoing argy-bargy and confusion that followed Charles’ execution – which he supported – he did rather well.
Whether Cromwell was an idealist or a cynical bastard – well, you pays our money and you makes your choice. Hill opts for him being more of an idealist, although he does not shy away from harsh criticism as and when. Cromwell could be murderously ruthless, but that viciousness really came to the fore in the atrocities in Ireland fro which he must be blamed, one in Drogheda and another in Wexford.
Cromwell’s actions might be better understood, although certainly not excused in the slightest by how he and many others regarded the Irish as Untermenschen. After the massacre at Drogheda her wrote, piously (which makes it even worse):
But the impression I get from Hill is that not only did religion play an overwhelmingly important role in Cromwell’s life, but he might well have been something of a fanatic.
It seems that when he was in his mid-thirties, he had some kind of emotional breakdown, perhaps related to his his then business failures and declining prosperity and socially being obliged to move ‘downmarket’ – who knows?. This breakdown also involved some kind of religious and spiritual ‘revelations’s.
In Cromwell’s mind ‘doing God’s will / work’ excused everything and he was thus blameless. While reading Hill’s book, it occurred to me that Cromwell might well be likened in that outlook to Al Qaeda and their successor ISIS.
He does not seem to have been driven by possible personal gain. When he was offered the crown, he turned it down, it seems, though, on pragmatic grounds (and many of his supporters might well have looked askance at him accepting it).
So there you have it: Cromwell – hero or zero or possibly something a little less crude and more subtle. Who knows but I’ll be back with a second take once I’ve read Fraser’s book.
It is a sad truth that, as seems to happen at then of all revolutions, that the old ‘ruling’ class is not defeated, just refreshed, with its values surviving. In Protectorate England men who had fought well in the Civil Wars were raised in status, received land and were thus bumped up several social notches, a position they – understandably? – jealously guarded.
Here are two observations which might be relevant. There’s the French saying
Plus ca change c'est plus la meme choseand from the Italian novel The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa about the Risorgimento (The unification of Italy)
Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi(Everything must change for everything to stay the same and I have to confess that although I knew the English version, I had to look up what the Italians say).
Hill’s book, God’s Englishman, is about Oliver Cromwell, and I seems I have so have mentioned him very little. It’s time to make amends.
What kind of man Cromwell was, will depend upon who you ask. Although he became a member of the House of Commons in 1628, just for a year as the cack-handed fool Charles II dissolved Parliament in 1929, he was still insignificant.
He was born into the middling sort of rural gentry but then was largely down on his luck until he was re-elected in 1640 when Charles needed money and was forced to ask Parliament for it. It was only when fighting eventually broke out that one of Cromwell’s core talents was revealed: fighting and leading mean into battle.
Later, once the fighting had ended, it became apparent he had another useful talent, one for politics, and in the ongoing argy-bargy and confusion that followed Charles’ execution – which he supported – he did rather well.
Whether Cromwell was an idealist or a cynical bastard – well, you pays our money and you makes your choice. Hill opts for him being more of an idealist, although he does not shy away from harsh criticism as and when. Cromwell could be murderously ruthless, but that viciousness really came to the fore in the atrocities in Ireland fro which he must be blamed, one in Drogheda and another in Wexford.
Cromwell’s actions might be better understood, although certainly not excused in the slightest by how he and many others regarded the Irish as Untermenschen. After the massacre at Drogheda her wrote, piously (which makes it even worse):
I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are satisfactory grounds for such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.I must repeat that apart form what I have learned from Hill’s book I have scant knowledge of Cromwell and his life and personality (and shall start reading Antonia Fraser’s biography of him once I have finished writing this).
But the impression I get from Hill is that not only did religion play an overwhelmingly important role in Cromwell’s life, but he might well have been something of a fanatic.
It seems that when he was in his mid-thirties, he had some kind of emotional breakdown, perhaps related to his his then business failures and declining prosperity and socially being obliged to move ‘downmarket’ – who knows?. This breakdown also involved some kind of religious and spiritual ‘revelations’s.
In Cromwell’s mind ‘doing God’s will / work’ excused everything and he was thus blameless. While reading Hill’s book, it occurred to me that Cromwell might well be likened in that outlook to Al Qaeda and their successor ISIS.
He does not seem to have been driven by possible personal gain. When he was offered the crown, he turned it down, it seems, though, on pragmatic grounds (and many of his supporters might well have looked askance at him accepting it).
So there you have it: Cromwell – hero or zero or possibly something a little less crude and more subtle. Who knows but I’ll be back with a second take once I’ve read Fraser’s book.
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