Pip: A biography that takes four decades to write and still, apparently, manages to avoid the most inconvenient parts of its subject's career — freerein61 has thoughts.
Mara: This episode covers one substantial piece: a critical review of John Morrill's forthcoming biography of Oliver Cromwell, which frames his entire career through the lens of religious sincerity. The review pushes back hard on what it calls revisionist historiography — the method, the Ireland chapters, the treatment of the Levellers, and a pointed polemic aimed at Tony Benn.
Pip: Let's start with the biography itself and what the review says Morrill is actually doing.
Cromwell Rehabilitated: Morrill's Biography and Its Ideological Stakes
Mara: The central question here is whether religious sincerity can serve as a genuine historical explanation — or whether foregrounding Cromwell's faith is itself an ideological move that displaces the class and colonial dynamics of the English Revolution.
Pip: The review names that move directly. Morrill's interpretive engine, as the piece describes it, is the claim that Cromwell "never doubted he was doing God's will," and that his political, military, and colonial decisions arose from "a profound sense of providential vocation."
Mara: And the review's response is that sincerity is not an explanatory category. Every seventeenth-century regicide, colonial adventurer, and religious persecutor believed he was doing God's will. That was a universal condition of the era, not a distinguishing feature of Cromwell's career.
Pip: So the argument is not that Cromwell was faking it — it's that his being genuine tells us almost nothing useful.
Mara: Exactly. The review frames it as mistaking ideological form for historical content. Cromwell's providential rhetoric was the language through which political and class forces expressed themselves, not the engine driving them. Morrill, the piece argues, treats that rhetoric as transparent — a direct window into motivation — when it was actually the discursive convention of the period.
Pip: Which is a generous way of saying the biography is empirically rich and historically evasive — the review's own phrase, more or less.
Mara: That tension runs through the whole piece. Morrill's archival command is acknowledged as formidable: letters, speeches, military dispatches, religious meditations, all reconstructed with precision. But the review argues that empirical richness is not the same as historical explanation. Moving from letter to sermon to meditation without situating those documents in structural context produces detail without analysis.
Pip: The Drogheda and Wexford sections make that tension sharpest. Morrill concedes the scale — the review notes he acknowledges that Cromwell's actions "verge on the genocidal" — and then asks how a sincere Christian could commit such acts.
Mara: The review calls that question misplaced. It reframes it: the real question is what class forces and colonial imperatives made such acts necessary to the English bourgeois revolution. The massacres were not aberrations — they were policy, part of the subjugation of Ireland required by English capital, aimed at breaking a rival social order, clearing land, and reorganising Irish society under English landlordism and mercantile control.
Pip: Turning a colonial strategy into a moral puzzle is, admittedly, quite a trick.
Mara: The review extends that critique to the Protectorate. Morrill presents it as a godly commonwealth, a culmination of Cromwell's spiritual journey. The piece reads it instead as a bourgeois dictatorship — one that consolidated property relations, suppressed radical movements, and expanded colonial power. The Major Generals become military instruments of class rule, not moral overseers; the dissolutions of Parliament become acts of authoritarian consolidation, not spiritual frustration.
Mara: The Levellers and Diggers get a dedicated section in the review, and it's pointed. The Putney Debates, often romanticised, are described as the prelude to repression. When Leveller agitation continued, Cromwell imprisoned leaders including Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn, crushed mutinies in the New Model Army, and broke up Digger communities. The review argues Morrill acknowledges these events but presents them as expressions of Cromwell's "inflexible conscience" and "fear of disorder" — dissolving counterrevolution into moral struggle.
Pip: And the Tony Benn polemic is where the review says the biography's ideological hand shows most clearly. Morrill argues Benn misunderstood Cromwell by claiming him for a democratic tradition. The review's verdict is the reverse: Benn understood him too well.
Mara: The piece reads Benn's interpretation as insisting on the political nature of Cromwell's actions — placing the English Revolution within a broader tradition of struggles against autocracy and for popular sovereignty, while acknowledging Cromwell's contradictions. Morrill's anxiety, the review suggests, is that this reading threatens the revisionist project by refusing to depoliticise the revolution.
Mara: The review situates Morrill within a wider school — Conrad Russell, Mark Kishlansky, Blair Worden — whose consistent aim has been to dismantle Marxist and social-historical interpretations and replace them with a narrative in which the Civil War was not a revolution at all, but a tragic misunderstanding between constitutionalists. Cromwell is the central obstacle to that project because his career makes the revolution's class content impossible to deny.
Pip: The closing argument is that a genuine reckoning requires exactly what Morrill sets out to discredit: a materialist analysis that holds the contradictions together — the general who shattered the monarchy and suppressed the Levellers, the man who invoked divine providence while presiding over massacres that served English capital.
Mara: The review names Christopher Hill, Brian Manning, and Tony Benn as the tradition that has always insisted on that political reading — and ends by arguing that Morrill's biography is not a correction of past distortions but the most polished attempt yet to produce one.
Pip: Where the English Revolution goes in the historical imagination matters — and that's a fight that's clearly not over.
Mara: The stakes the review keeps returning to are real: how a society narrates its own revolutionary past shapes what counts as legitimate politics in the present.
Pip: Piety as a solvent for inconvenient history — it's a durable formula. Next time, more from A Trumpet of Sedition.
