I first came across Christopher Hill in the Hilary Term (January to March) of 1963 when I attended lectures he gave in the dining hall of Balliol College, Oxford. These were based on the material he later published in 1964 in his book, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England. I was very surprised by his delivery of these lectures given in a rather flat, even-paced voice punctuated by copious quotations from printed sources and accompanied by an interpretation of this period in a form of soft determinism. Rather disconcertingly, every two or three sentences he would sniff as if to punctuate his remarks.
It was more of a surprise to me in October, 1965 when he was assigned as my supervisor by the History Faculty Board for my prospective work on the 2nd Earl of Warwick. At our first meeting, he enquired after my social background and about my watch, which was one of the very first to provide the date as well as the time, and what it had cost. I was then sent off to the upper reading room of the old Bodleian Library to begin working through the Reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and the State Papers Domestic which were on the open shelves. But that was really all the advice he offered on where to find he sources for my research. Unfortunately, he was not acquainted with the manuscript sources available in the Bodleian, in the Public Record Office then in Chancery Lane, London or in the Manuscript Department of the British Museum: he had heard of county record offices but had not, to the best of my knowledge, ever visited one. In a supervisor of a thesis on early to middle seventeenth century history, this was a serious handicap. The old saying that undergraduates were taught while postgraduates taught themselves was never more true than in my case.
I usually saw Christopher Hill in his office in Balliol once a term. He sat in a chair that hung by a chain from the ceiling and gently swung from side to side as he listened to what I had to report. But he remained resolutely silent even when I had nothing more to say. I found this silence rather alarming and only learnt later that it was apparently an old Oxford teaching technique aimed at encouraging pupils to be more forthcoming about their findings. Unfortunately, Christopher Hill knew very little indeed about the Stuart peerage and landowners and, unlike Hugh Trevor-Roper, the Regius Professor of Modern History, had few positive suggestions to offer about the direction of my research or the contents of my draft chapters. From that point of view, it was an unproductive process. Once a week in term time, on Monday evenings to the best of my recollection, postgraduates assembled in his room together with female undergraduates from St Hilda’s College invited by his wife, Bridget, met to consume a barrel of beer the Hills provided. I went to a couple of these but was so deafened by the noise that I stopped going.
The last time I saw Christopher and Bridget Hill was at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California in January, 1997 when I had the good fortune to hold a fellowship there. We were all refugees from bitterly cold weather in England. He was characteristically robust in denouncing the Prime Minister John Major’s government as “bloody awful”. There was little doubt either in my conversations with both of them that he had been wounded by the attacks of Mark Kishlansky and, much earlier, by Jack Hexter on his methods and findings. Bridget Hill confided to me that she was worried about his health since he had recently completed a new introduction to the Calendar of State Papers Venetian which she thought had taken a lot out of him. (On her own health problems of which I later learnt she said nothing.) By then, of course, he was in his mid-eighties and was treated with considerable deference by other scholars then at the Huntington Library. After that, apart from one or two letters I sent to their home in Sibford Ferris in Oxfordshire, our contacts ceased.
“the day I joined the militia…he was probably a Trotskyist or an anarchist, and in the peculiar conditions of our time, when people of that sort are not killed by the Gestapo, they are usually killed by the GPU”.
George Orwell
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”― George Orwell, Animal Farm
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” ― George Orwell, 1984
D J Taylor’s book is a useful but somewhat politically limited biography of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s book and his previous masterpiece Animal Farm are correctly seen as “key texts necessary for an understanding of the twenty-first century.” Taylor concentrates mainly on the making of the novel, trying to find out how and why Orwell wrote it.
Orwell took five years to write his last book and was already very ill during its gestation period. Written in seclusion on the windswept Isle of Jura, off Scotland’s coast, he died less than a year after it was published in 1949. Taylor writes, “By writing about the terrors that obsessed him, he had got them out of his system. 1984 is a devastating analysis of the corruption of language and dystopian horror world…and more.”
Taylor believes that Orwell’s idea for 1984 came from his study of The 1943 Allied leaders’ Tehran Conference, which according to Taylor, gave “his consciousness a decisive kick.” Maybe it did, or perhaps it did not. But Taylor misses the point. Orwell’s 1984 attempts to come to terms with Stalinism’s betrayal of the Russian and Spanish revolutions. To give his book clarity and accuracy, Orwell carried out extensive research. One important influence was Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We.[1] Orwell did not live to see how important the book would become. It sold over 40 million copies and is as contemporary today as when it was written.
Orwell died in January 1950. One consequence of his early death was that he could not defend his work or prevent it from being used by right-wing ideologues in Europe and the United States for their ideological crusade. As was said in the opening of this review, Taylor’s biography of 1984 is useful but limited. The same can be said about his biography of Orwell despite winning the Whitbread Book Award in 2003.
Missing from both books is an accurate political evaluation of George Orwell himself. Orwell was part of a generation of workers and intellectuals who moved sharply to the left in the 1930s in response to the Depression, the rise of Nazism in Germany and the growing struggles of the working class. While Orwell looked to the Soviet Union for leadership, very early on, Orwell saw that the Stalin regime had nothing to do with Socialism and was betraying the ideals of the 1917 Revolution.
From the late 1930s onwards, he described himself as a Democratic Socialist, but he was mostly a centrist politically wavering between reform and revolution. He detested inequality and, on numerous occasions, favoured the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system. This sentiment was expressed in his book 1984, and Orwell’s main character Winston had a broadly sympathetic and hopeful attitude towards the working class or, as he says, the “proles.”
In the book, he believed the “proles were the only hope for the future. If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.” If only they could somehow become conscious of their strength needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose, they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened. They had a “vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill…the future belonged to the proles.”[2]
Orwell was never a Marxist but was influenced by Marxist writers such as Leon Trotsky. I have not been able to ascertain if Orwell read Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed, but he certainly knew what was in it. But as Fred Mazelis writes, “Orwell was always ambivalent about the genuine legacy of the October Revolution which Trotsky represented. His identification with the working class was based more on emotion and sentiment than scientific conviction. He associated with centrists like the Independent Labour Party in Britain and the POUM in Spain. The ILP called for “left unity,” adapting to the Stalinists and criticizing Trotsky’s merciless critique of Stalinism as “sectarian.” In Spain, the POUM played a similar role, giving crucial support to the Popular Front government, which turned around and suppressed it. At the same time, the Stalinists assassinated the POUM leaders because they could not tolerate any independent left-wing working-class movement.”
Orwell’s Animal Farm was his second attempt at reckoning with Stalinism, his first being the book Homage to Catalonia. At 120 pages, the book Animal farm can be read on many levels. As John Newsinger points out, “The politics of the book were pretty straightforward: a capitalist farmer had been quite properly overthrown by the worker animals, and an egalitarian socialist system had been introduced on the farm. The pigs had then betrayed the revolution with the revolutionary Snowball (Trotsky) driven out and the dictator Napoleon (Stalin) establishing a murderous police state”.[3]
Right-wing ideologues have attempted to portray the book as anti-revolutionary. Orwell refutes this slander saying, “I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves (Kronstadt). If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down, then it would have been all right…What I was trying to say was, “You can’t have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship.”[4]
Several short-sighted and stupid ideologues, both left and right, saw that the novel’s police state had an uncanny resemblance to Stalin’s USSR and accused Orwell of being an anti-communist but as Richard Mynick points out, “Orwell was too clear-sighted to conflate Stalinism with socialism (writing, for example, “My recent novel [‘1984’] is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism…but as a show-up of the perversions…which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism.”[5]
Despite having serious political differences with Leon Trotsky, there is no doubt that Orwell respected and was heavily influenced by the writings of Trotsky. As Jeffrey Meyers writes in his not-too-friendly essay on Trotsky and Orwell, “In May 1946 Orwell tried to persuade his publisher Fredric Warburg to publish the English edition of Trotsky’s Life of Stalin (1941): “I have read a good deal of it, mostly the bits dealing with Stalin’s childhood, with the civil war and with the alleged murder of Lenin” by Stalin. The earlier parts were “particularly interesting because they demonstrate the difficulty of establishing any fact about a public figure who has been a subject for propaganda. It might be worth trying to get a little more information about the circumstances of Trotsky’s assassination, which may have been partly decided on because of the knowledge that he was writing this very book.”[6]
To conclude, the discussion about Stalinism and the betrayal of revolutions has little interest for Taylor, which is certainly reflected in this book. His main concern is literature and culture. As Newsinger correctly points out, “Taylor’s achievement in his volume is to construct an Orwell who is acceptable to the literary establishment, someone non-threatening, irredeemably one of them. As far as he is concerned, two of the major influences on Nineteen Eighty-Four were Orwell’s rat phobia and the totalitarian horrors he had experienced at his prep school St Cyprian’s!”.[7]
It is not in the realms of possibility in this review to give justice to what was Orwell’s legacy. His most important work concerned the question of what Stalinism was and how to fight it. His most important books satirized the Stalinist political regime and warned of the dangers of totalitarianism. If you ignore the rubbish about him being a reactionary defender of the status quo or even an anti-communist, a systematic study of his most important works reveals a far more nuanced and complex individual. He was very much a product of his time. An old Russian proverb[8] once said, “It sometimes happens to eagles that they descend lower than chickens, but chickens never succeed In mounting as high as eagles”. George Orwell remains an eagle.
[8]In criticizing Rosa Luxemburg Lenin once quoted two simple lines from a Russian proverb: “It sometimes happens to eagles that they descend lower than chickens but chickens never succeed In mounting as high as eagles”, and he added, “she was and remains an eagle”.
David Caute’s new book is a well-written and deeply researched account of the widespread British Secret Service’s covert surveillance of British writers and intellectuals in the last century. Caute’s work on official documents held at the National Archives shows the massive surveillance of anybody deemed a threat to National security. MI5 opened Letters, tapped phones, private homes were bugged, and hundreds of people were under constant surveillance by Special Branch agents.
Those watched included journalists, academics, scientists, filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians and, in some cases, the ordinary public. Caute lists more than 200 victims, but the figures will be much higher as more files are released to the National Archives.
MI5 spied on such prominent figures as Arthur Ransome, Paul Robeson, J.B. Priestley, Kingsley Amis, George Orwell, Doris Lessing, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Dorothy Hodgkin, Jacob Bronowski, John Berger, Benjamin Britten, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Kingsley Martin, Michael Redgrave, Joan Littlewood, Joseph Losey, Michael Foot and Harriet Harman.
So wide-ranging was the surveillance that even Winston Churchill’s cousin Clare Sheridan who was sympathetic to the Russian revolution, was investigated. According to writer Alan Judd, she was never a Communist, but “she got herself to Russia, lived in the Kremlin and sculpted busts of Soviet leaders, including Trotsky, Zinoviev, Dzerzhinsky and Lenin himself. She subsequently had a relationship with the pro-communist Charlie Chaplin and survived attempted rape by Mussolini. She travelled the world broadcasting anti-British views and was monitored by MI5 until they concluded that she was neither a spy nor a security threat but merely ‘extraordinarily indiscreet’ and had a passion for international mischief-making’. She was later reconciled with her cousin, spent time at Chartwell during the second world war and converted to Catholicism.”[1]
MI5 was set up in 1909 and was tasked to look into “activities designed to undermine or overthrow parliamentary democracy by political, violent or industrial means”. MI5 came into its own during the first world war. Its use of the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) against perceived revolutionaries, pacifists, democratic socialists, and anti-war activists. Members of the Independent Labour Party, such as Fenner Brockwaycame in for special scrutiny.
MI5’s task became especially acute when in 1917, the Bolshevik revolution occurred, which threatened to escalate into a worldwide revolution. The spectre of the socialist revolution haunts the secret service even today.
As Caute shows in his book, most people investigated and labelled subversive were no such thing. One such figure mentioned by Caute is the writer Arthur Ransome who, although was sympathetic to the Russian revolution and interviewed both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, was never a revolutionary as this quote from his book Six Weeks in Russia shows, “I should have liked to explain what was the appeal of the revolution to men like Colonel Robins and myself, both of us men far removed in origin and upbringing from the revolutionary and socialist movements in our own countries. Of course, no one who was able, as we were able, to watch the men of the revolution at close quarters could believe for a moment that they were the merely paid agents of the very power which, more than all the others, represented the stronghold they had set out to destroy. We knew the injustice being done to these men to urge us in their defence. But there was more to it than that. There was a feeling, from which we could never escape, of the creative effort of the revolution.”[2]
In the post-war period, Caute’s book shows that the CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain) took up a large part of MI5’s spying activity. All its leading cadre and large numbers of the CPHG (Communist Party Historians Group) were under constant surveillance. Caute believes the CPGB was not revolutionary and harboured no plans to overthrow capitalism.
According to the Trotskyists of the Socialist Labour League, who opposed Stalinism from the left, they were “a group of embittered doctrinaires without roots or perspectives or the ability to learn from their mistakes; a coterie of well-meaning university Dons and writers who have something to say on every subject except the class struggle taking place under their noses; not a party paying lip-service to Marxism but dominated by whichever faction happens to be in control in Moscow.[3]
Caute’s study of the Communist Party Historians Group highlights a historian’s difficulty in using and writing about these documents. It is not just a question of saying how and why people were spied upon, but any study must place the spy’s actions in the social and political context of the time. As Madeleine Davis writes:
“The release of MI5 files on Thompson and Hilton added to those of prominent party intellectuals already available, provides a fresh set of primary sources for and a renewed opportunity to consider these issues in their context, while the Thompson material has extra significance given the continued embargo on his papers.14 These files present problems as sources for historians interested in the human subjects of surveillance rather than its techniques and policy contexts. The secret, partial and incomplete nature of the material, retention or redaction of documents, and the difficulty in many cases of cross-checking against other sources limits their usefulness.
Although some triangulation is possible against the CPGB’s archive, awareness among prominent communists of extensive surveillance provoked counter-measures, including selective record keeping. It reinforced a culture of secrecy and mistrust. Thus while the volume of MI5 personal files now available has started to generate a significant literature drawing on both sets of primary sources, 15 investigation of the motives of those involved in the 1956 crisis needs also to draw on a substantial specialist secondary literature. Especially relevant is work emerging from the ‘biographical turn’ in communist historiography and work that examines both the CPGB’s cultural analysis and the party’s internal culture to illuminate the complex and contradictory reality of Zhdanovism’s implementation and contestation in the British party.”[4]
In the Chapter, The BBC Toes the Line Caute shows that MI5’s vetting of BBC staff was well-known, but the spy agency’s surveillance of independent television was not so much. In 1969, MI5 agents were particularly interested in Granada TV’s World In Action. Although not a Trotskyist, one of the high-profile journalists, John Pilger, had a large dossier on him. MI5 concluded that there was “no evidence of a conspiracy” at the programme and reported that any interest from the Communist Party of Great Britain had “diminished.” As one file claims. “Communists are less influential than Trotskyists, who, however, are too disunited to be able to execute a joint plan.”
Caute’s view of Trotskyism neatly dovetails that of MI5. Although a significant amount of time was spent by MI5 infiltrating many Psuedo left groups claiming to be Trotskyists, Caute, like MI5, thought the Trotskyist movement to be disunited. Perhaps this explains Caute’s ideologically light-minded attitude towards state penetration of the Trotskyist movement and certainly accounts for its lack of coverage in his book.
In March 2000, an article appeared on the WSWS.ORG called Was there a high-level MI5 agent in the British Workers Revolutionary Party?. Caute does not mention anything about this grave matter. As the article’s author David North explains: “A former agent for the British Security Service (known as MI5) has alleged in a sworn statement that the agency received reports from a high-level spy inside the Workers Revolutionary Party during the late 1960s. The ex-agent, David Shayler, is currently living in exile in France, where he has fled to escape prosecution for his exposure of state secrets. In his February 18 affidavit, Shayler asserts that the spy provided MI5 with reports of financial support given by John Lennon to the WRP. Shayler recounts that he was shown portions of an MI5 file relating to the agency’s surveillance of Lennon, whose socialist and anti-imperialist sentiments angered the British ruling class. The affidavit states that the material “concerned Lennon’s support for the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), a Trotskyist organisation. According to the file, a source in the WRP had reported that Lennon gave tens of thousands of pounds sterling to the WRP in the late 1960s and also provided some funds to the Irish Republican Army at around the same time.”[5]
If David Caute has any information, he must publicise it. As North points out, all those committed to democratic rights in Britain and internationally must call for the identification of the MI5 agent inside the SLL/WRP. This is important not only to expose the individual (or individuals) involved but to educate a new generation of socialists about the dangers posed by state infiltration and provocation.
“I desire that those that had engaged in it should speak, for really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly. Sir, I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under; and I am confident that when I have heard the reasons against it, something will be said to answer those reasons, in so much that I should doubt whether he was an Englishman or no that should doubt of these things.”
Thomas Rainborowe
Stanley Slaughter’s book Thomas Rainborowe -Dangerous Radical is one of the many forgotten books which litter the study of the English bourgeois revolution. Which is a shame because it is not a bad book. Unlike many historians, I do not believe its subject matter Thomas Rainsborough is a forgotten hero of the 17th century English revolution.
It must be said that Slaughter’s job was not made easy by the scarcity of archival sources. NothingRainsborowe wrote has survived, and if it were not for his intervention in the discussion at Putney 1647, which elevated him to one of the foremost radical voices of the English revolution, he would have remained just another excellent military figure.
The English revolution produced many fine and brave individuals. Thomas Rainsborough was one of the best. He was an extraordinarily gifted soldier, and his expertise was as a siege master. Like many of his generation, he showed reckless courage in battle. Only Oliver Cromwell stood above him in military skill.
But as Slaughter’s well-written and interesting biography states, he was best known for his radical politics. His radical politics were the main reason the Royalists assassinated him with the collaboration of presbyterian parliamentarians. As Ian Gentles writes : “Rainborowe continued to be a thorn in the side of the military grandees. In October and November he played a leading part in the army general council’s debates at Putney on the Leveller Agreement of the People. He poured scorn on Cromwell and others who said of the projected constitution, ‘Itt’s a huge alteration, itt’s a bringing in of New Lawes’, commenting, ‘if writinges bee true there hath bin many scufflinges betweene the honest men of England and those that have tyranniz’d over them’ (Clarke Papers, 1.246). When the grandees sought to prolong the discussion of the army’s engagements, Rainborowe insisted that they move on to address the Agreement of the People. When Ireton attacked the principle of universal manhood suffrage, Rainborowe took up the challenge in words that still ring in our ears after more than three-and-a-half centuries.”[1]
The exact circumstances of his murder are still a bit murky, and many wild conspiracy theories still abound, such as Oliver Cromwell organising the murder. What is known is that the perpetrators of this murder were given free rein to carry out their deadly deed. Slaughter draws attention to the relative ease the royalist assassins were able to assassinate a leading player in the English revolution and escape unscathed without as much as a scratch back to Pontefract, passing through the lines of the parliamentary forces who were more hostile to the radical Ransborowe than they were to the Royalist they were supposed to be fighting.
It is perhaps an understatement to say that Rainsborowe was a controversial figure hated by Royalists and Presbyterians. It was his misfortune to serve in a parliamentary Navy that was, on the whole, Royalist in its political persuasion.
Not only were they hostile to Ransborowe’s appointment, they were still politically loyal to the king and were opposed to Parliament’s treatment of Charles Ist. They sided with the Presbyterians in Parliament in calling for the disbandment of the New Model Army :
THE DECLARATION Of the Navie, being THE True Copie of a Letter from the Officers of the Navie, to the Commissioners: With their Resolutions upon turning out Colonell RAINSBROUGH from being their Commander.
28th.May, 1648.
Worshipfull;
THese are to certifie you that wee the Commanders, and Officers of the Ship Constant Reformation, with the rest of the Fleet, have secured the Ships for the service of King and Parliament, and have refused to be under the Command of Colonell Rainsbrough, by reason wee conceive him to be a man not wel-affected to the King, Parliament and Kingdome, and we doe hereby declare unto you, that we have unanimously joyned with the Kentish Gentlemen, in their just Petition to the Parliament, to this purpose following, videlicet.
First, that the Kings Majesty with all expedition be admitted in Safety and Honour, to treat with his two Houses of Parliament.
Secondly, that the army now under the Command of the Lord Fairfax, to be forthwith disbanded, their Arrears being paid them.
Thirdly, That the known Laws of the Kingdome may be Established and continued, whereby we ought to be Governed and Iudged.
Fourthly, That the Priviledges of Parliament and the Liberty of the Sub∣jects may be preserved.
And to this purpose we have sent our loving Friend Captaine Penrose, with a Letter to the Earle of Warwick, and we are resolved to take in no Commander whatsoever, but such as shall agree and correspond with us in this Petition, and shall resolve to live and dye with us, in the behalfe of King and Parliament, which is the Positive Result of us.[2]
As Ian Gentles correctly points out, not only was Rainsborowe one of the “most vivid actors of the English revolution” he was also one of the most important. It bewilders me that so few biographies exist, the most recent being Adrian Tinniswood 2013 book.[3] It is hoped that this will change soon.
[1] Rainborowe [Rainborow], Thomas (d. 1648) Ian J. Gentles-https://doi-org.lonlib.idm.oclc.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/23020
“The natural condition of mankind is a state of war in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” because individuals are in a “war of all against all”
Thomas Hobbes
“I would rather have a plain russett-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than that which you call a gentleman and nothing else.”
Oliver Cromwell
When history moves with the speed of a cart-this is itself rationality and itself regularity. When the popular masses themselves, with all their virgin primitiveness, their simple crude decisiveness, begin to make history, to bring to life directly and immediately “principles and theories”, then the bourgeoisie feels fear. And cries out that “rationality is receding to the background”.
Vladimir Lenin
Ian Gentles new book is the definitive account of how the New Model Army became an armed party and was the motor force of the English Bourgeois revolution. The book is meticulously researched and extremely well written.
The military history of the New Model Army is well known, but where Gentles book differs is that it is a political history of the rise and fall of the world-famous 17th-century army. As the book title suggests, it was truly an “agent of the Revolution”. While one of the most formidable fighting forces ever put together, it was also one of the most radical apart from the army led by Leon Trotsky after the Russian Revolution. Formed in 1645, it played a crucial role in the aristocracy’s overthrow and brought to power one of the finest representative of the English bourgeoise.
Leon Trotsky said of the New Model Army “the parliamentary army has converted itself into an independent political force. It has concentrated in its ranks the Independents, the pious and resolute petty bourgeoisie, the craftsmen and farmers. This army powerfully interferes in social life, not merely as an armed force, but as a Praetorian Guard and as the political representative of a new class opposing the prosperous and rich bourgeoisie. Correspondingly the army creates a new state organ rising above the military command: a council of soldiers’ and officers’ deputies (“agitators”). A new period of double sovereignty has thus arrived: that of the Presbyterian Parliament and the Independents’ army.
This leads to open conflicts. The bourgeoisie proves powerless to oppose with its own army the “model army” of Cromwell – that is, the armed plebeians. The conflict ends with a purgation of the Presbyterian Parliament by the sword of the Independents. There remains but the rump of a parliament; the dictatorship of Cromwell is established. The lower ranks of the army, under the leadership of the Levellers – the extreme left wing of the revolution – try to oppose the rule of the upper military levels, the patricians of the army, their own veritably plebeian regime. But this new two-power system does not succeed in developing: the Levellers, the lowest depths of the petty bourgeoisie, have not yet, nor can have, their historic path. Cromwell soon settles accounts with his enemies. A new political equilibrium, and still by no means a stable one, is established for a period of years.[1]
Gentles, a leading authority, examines every aspect of the New Model Army. It killed a King and carried out pioneering military tactics occupying London three times, creating a republic and keeping Cromwell in power as Lord Protector until his death. The book has been expanded to 1660, which means it covers the expedition to the West Indies in 1655 and the Restoration in 1660, which, paradoxically, the NMA made happen.
The army was a hotbed of radical and religious ideas and beliefs. Gentles is no stranger to this subject. His new book is touted as a fully revised version of his 1992 work, but in reality, it is a different book.
As Gentles explains in an interview: “The first edition has been condensed to about half its original length. It assimilates much new research, particularly on the Levellers and army politics (by David Scott, John Rees, Rachel Foxley, Philip Baker, Elliot Vernon, Jason Peacey and others), as well as important new work on the army’s military history by James Scott Wheeler, Glenn Foard, Andrew Hopper, Malcolm Wanklyn, Ismini Pells and others). The new edition adds chapters on the Protectorate (1653-9) and the Restoration (1659-60). It adds substantial new material to the chapters on Ireland and Scotland, extensively using the recently published correspondence of Cromwell’s son Henry to illustrate the army’s increasing dissatisfaction with the Protectoral regime. For Scotland, it illuminates the role of Robert Lilburne and George Monck in bringing that nation to heel, using a previously undeciphered manuscript to add vividness to the narrative of Glencairn’s uprising in 1654. It also provides an in-depth, shocking account of the New Model’s disastrous expedition against the Spanish Caribbean colony of Hispaniola, from which Oliver Cromwell never recovered his confidence. Finally, it provides a detailed, and significantly different interpretation of the army’s role in the Restoration, explaining how that epochal event was brought about without bloodshed.”[2]
As Gentles states, the book contains the latest historiography from the last three decades on the radical groups inside the New Model Army. He does not go along with the various revisionist historians who have deliberately downplayed the influence of groups such as the Levellers inside the army.
He writes, “The Levellers were very influential, despite what other historians have said. As early as March 1647, they hitched their wagon to the New Model Army, regarding it as their main hope for achieving their programme. The Leveller leaders spent a good deal of time at army headquarters in the mid-summer of 1647, striving to politicise it. In October and November, they virtually won over the Council of the Army, with the exception of the conservative Grandees, to back the Agreement of the People. A year later, when the army was desperately in need of political allies, the Levellers got it to adopt the Agreement of the People with the sole proviso that it be approved by Parliament. The decisive falling out between Leveller and army leaders did not occur until the spring of 1649, and even then, many officers remained supporters of Levellerism, which they labelled ‘The Good Old Cause’, up until the eve of the Restoration.”[3]
As Gentles’s book shows, the study of the NMA is integral to understanding how the English bourgeois revolution came about and succeeded. One surprising thing about the book is how little of Gentles’ historiographical proclivities are in this book. He does not subscribe to a’ Three Kingdoms’ approach to the English civil war – as Jasmin L. Johnson wrote, contained within this approach ‘is a tendency to bounce back and forth from country to country and from campaign to campaign, causing confusion and obscuring the effects that developments in one theatre of operations might have had on the others’.[4]
While Gentles is not immune to the siren calls of revisionist and post-revisionist historians, he places the actions of the NMA as part of a ‘people’s revolution. This tends to indicate that the influence of Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill and Brian Manning is not entirely dead.
As was said earlier, Professor Gentles is one of the few modern-day historians who does not downplay the influence groups such as the Levellers had inside the NMA. His new book offers a fresh insight into the complex relationship between Oliver Cromwell and Leveller leaders such as John Lilburne.
Gentles does not spend much time on military matters in this new book, and he acknowledges that Cromwell had no formal military training. Gentles, it seems, does not rate him highly as an army figure which is a little strange because if you read Royalist-supporting military historians like Peter Young, you get a much more accurate picture of Cromwell’s military prowess.
Gentles believes that Cromwell’s adventures in Ireland are a blot on his record and suggests that Cromwell’s overriding concern in Ireland was the neutralisation of Royalist threat and that the attack on, and massacre of, Catholics was a by-product of that action. Cromwell’s hatred for Catholicism was prevalent amongst the rising bourgeoisie of the 17th century. He further suggests that Cromwell played a key part in developing Irish nationalism.
Quite where the NMA fits into Gentles’s belief that the leaders of the revolution belonged to a ‘Junto’ is not explored. The definition of Junto is a group of men united together for some secret intrigue’, with the champion of this new historiography being John Adamson. The main theoretical premise of his book The Noble Revolt is to view the Civil War as basically a coup d’état by a group of nobles or aristocrats who no longer supported the King. According to Diane Purkiss, these nobles were ‘driven by their code of honour. They acted to protect themselves and the nation. Names such as Saye, Bedford, Essex and Warwick move from the sidelines to occupy centre stage, as do their counterparts among Scottish peers. They, not the rude masses, plucked a king from his throne.
I recommend this book to general readers and more academically minded students, as it is intelligent and well-researched. It has extensive footnotes, a lengthy bibliography, and excellent pictures, and it deserves a wide readership and should be on every universities book list.
[1] From Chapter 11 of The History of the Russian Revolution (1931)
I am currently working on a review of Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down. Although the conference to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the book has been moved to February, it still gives me some more time to work on this review and other work by Hill.
The new Bob Dylan book just arrived called The Philosophy of Modern Song. Having just glanced inside, it looks stunning with Dylan’s keen analytical insight into the modern song. I will review it for my website.
While there is a backlog of books I need to review, I will have to concentrate on some articles on the latest developments at Royal Mail. Management is hell-bent on destroying the pay conditions of thousands of postal workers and turning the company into an Amazon-style business with all that entails for the workforce, i.e. job cuts and redundancies. With Thirty thousand postal workers having already applied for early retirement, with more on the way, the CWU bureaucracy seems hell-bent on some shabby deal rather than mobilise postal workers against these attacks. Time for some independent rank-and-file committees to be established.
Early next year, I need to start some work on Stuart Hall. His Selected Writings on Marxism were published in 2021, and work on him is long overdue. When I did the first year of a pre-masters degree at Birkbeck, I researched him and his sidekick Raphael Samuel. Returning to the Bishopsgate Institute, where the Samuel archive is held, is a must.
Intend to do a short review of Show Me The Bodies, Peter Apps’ excellent-looking book on the corporate murder of 72 people in the Grenfell fire.
I am near the end of Blake Bailey’s biography of Phillip Roth. It is a superb read, and at over 900 pages long, it feels like I have lived with Roth all my life. Not sure I will review quite yet, and maybe do a bit more reading.
Given that most of the advertisements for my website go through Twitter, thanks to the megalomaniac Adolf Musk, I will have to look elsewhere to publicise the website and blog.
Meetings
On Monday, 21 November 2022, Elliot Vernon will talk on “The Wall and Glory of Jerusalem”: The message of sermons preached before the Lord Mayor and the City of London in the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649-1660. Part of Britain in Revolution series from Oxford University.
Christopher Hill and the English Revolution: 50 years after TWTUD- Sat, 4 February 2023, 09:30 – 17:00 GMT- Institute of Historical Research (IHR), School of Advanced Study Senate House Malet Street London WC1E 7HU
I was interested to read or rather to re-read Ann Talbot’s reflections from March, 2003 on Christopher Hill’s life and career. This assessment had two aspects, one political dealing with his trajectory as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and admirer of the former Soviet Union until his departure after the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and a second considering his historiographical legacy and its influence on and importance for later historical work.
As one of his former postgraduate pupils, I ought to begin by saying that I always got on perfectly well with him in personal terms in the late-1960s and again when I last saw him and his wife, Bridget, at the Huntington Library in California in January, 1997. By then, of course, his corpus of work had been overtaken by the so-called ‘revisionist’ revolt of the 1970s and by the assault on his methods by figures like J.H.Hexter and Mark Kishlansky. It is with the second of Ann Talbot’s arguments that I most concerned here.
Hill’s academic career was centred on the University of Oxford apart from a very brief spell in University College, Cardiff and military and diplomatic service during the Second World War. In Oxford, he was one of a cohort of distinguished historians – people like Hugh Trevor-Roper at Christ Church College and then as Regius Professor; John Cooper at Trinity College; Lawrence Stone until 1963 at Wadham College; John Habbakuk at All Souls and later Jesus Colleges; Menna Prestwich at St Hilda’s College; the young Keith Thomas at St John’s College; Valerie Pearl at Somerville College; and rising doctoral researchers like Nicholas Tyacke, Michael Mahony, John Morrill, Blair Worden and many others – which meant that his voice was one amongst many. He was less of a dominant figure in Oxford than many have supposed.
Nor was he the first to raise a revolt against the Whig interpretation elaborated by T.B.Macaulay and G.M.Trevleyan. R.G.Usher had disputed in the mid-1920s the claims of rising Parliamentary power advanced by S.R.Gardiner and C.H.Firth while R.H.Tawney had, by 1940, elaborated an economic and social interpretation of the causes of the English Revolution or Civil War that precipitated the famous ‘storm over the gentry’ once it had been enthusiastically embraced by Lawrence Stone. Christopher Hill was thus not the only begetter of a Marxist or materialist approach to the events of the 1640s and 1650s.
It was actually outside Oxford where Hill’s influence was chiefly felt in classes run by the Workers’ Education Association, in summer schools run by the Communist Party and, later, by the Socialist Workers’ Party (as Ann Talbot noted). On the European continent, especially in the countries controlled by the former Soviet Union, his articles, books and collections of essays were repeatedly translated and published. A casual trawl through eastern European and Russian websites reveals the lasting impact of his writings there. They are still cited in many of these countries as if they represented the latest scholarship on the English Revolution.
But it was not true to claim after Hill’s death that academic historians still defined their positions in relation to his works. Like Lawrence Stone, he had been superseded by later generations of historians. His interpretation of seventeenth-century events and figures had become much too predictable long before 1980. Since, moreover, the bulk of the surviving evidence from that period was and remains in manuscript form, his analysis lacked the fructifying nutriment of contact with original sources. That is not to belittle his achievements in his prime. He put arguments that needed to be challenged. He made claims that required refutation. He was an interesting observer of the past but not, in my view, a conclusively defining figure in twentieth-century historiography.
In a clear indication that the Communication Workers Union [CWU] bureaucracy has capitulated to Royal Mail and is preparing to end the current strike, the CWU General Secretary Dave Ward announced that the strike action on 12 and 14 November had been cancelled, which means there will be no strike action for over a month. The union has announced holding two 48-hour strikes around Black Friday and Cyber Monday – 24-25 November and 30 November – 1 December – and adding vague promises of strike action up to Christmas.
The union is wasting further time by asking postal workers to vote on the new Royal Mail ‘offer’ in a workplace ballot and a no-confidence vote in Royal Mail CEO Simon Thompson. So craven is the CWU bureaucracy’s action that its Head of Communication, Chris Webb, was forced to attack it saying loads of CWU members were angry and confused about the announcement and demanded that the union reinstate the two cancelled strike days—alongside the new ones. “People are saying, the union’s bottled it, we’re surrendering, we’re giving up to Royal Mail—why aren’t we keeping the pressure up?”
The ending of the two strikes on the 12th and 14th of November came as Royal Mail issued a new pay offer which is a massive pay cut and calls for further draconian attacks on postal workers’ pay and condition. Royal Mail is now docking pay and refusing overtime to make workers submit to their demands.
Royal Mail’s action is a further declaration of war on postal workers. Already 96 CWU members have been suspended nationally since the strikes began. Royal Mail wants to impose a 7 per cent rise over two years, plus a lump sum payment of 2 per cent this year, even though inflation is already at over 10 per cent. It would be paid only if postal workers agreed to Sunday working, new start times and flexible working. Royal Mail wants to tear up postal workers’ conditions that have taken decades to establish, slash jobs, and bring new starters in on worse terms and conditions.
All previous agreements with Royal Mail have been torn up. Union reps will no longer be allowed to have meetings or be released for union business. Overtime agreements are being scrapped. Delivery duties which were organised jointly by management and the union, will now be organised by managers only. Reserves can be sent to any office that needs them, and seniority of duties and holidays are to be scrapped. Workers’ performance is now being tracked and assessed by data from the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). In other words, Royal Mail intends to have a low-wage Uber-style workforce.
The CWU union bureaucracy described the offer as “a surrender document.” But that is exactly what they have done. As Laura Tiernan states, “Royal Mail’s announcement has blown the CWU’s corporatist strategy out of the water”.
Instead of rejecting this offer out of hand, instigating indefinite strike action, and establishing a strike fund, the union bureaucracy has called for more talks with an employer that has no intention of talking or backing down. Ward states, “On occasions, there has to be a moment where you focus on trying to negotiate, And it has been hard to focus on the negotiations when you’re also out on strike. Sometimes that isn’t always helpful.” How are negotiations supposed to take place when even Royal Mail’s CEO, Simon Thompson, does not even turn up for talks?
Ward explained his reasoning, saying, “We have got to take stock of where we are now, and we do have to put on the table other parts of our strategy to win this dispute. “There will be a hell of a lot of activity we’ll be expecting you to undertake, and we don’t want that activity to run in conjunction with the strike action that was planned on the 12 and 14 November. “Never believe there’s only one tactic that wins a dispute. What we’re putting forward is a rounded strategy. We don’t just get into a cycle where every strike is followed by the next one, the next one. You have to have a wider plan.”
Ward’s pathetic and treacherous plan is to write letters to MPs, asking for a hearing at a parliamentary committee and trying to get a debate in parliament. He also said union leaders wanted a meeting with Royal Mail’s shareholders: “We will explain to the shareholders that the CWU is up for change, and we will put forward our change plan.”
These shareholders are not innocent bystanders in this dispute. Royal Mail CEO Simon Thompson, along with his private equity friends such as VESA and the Tory government, which has just greenlighted a possible takeover by billionaire shareholder Daniel Kretinsky, who wants to end Saturday letters deliveries, are pursuing a strategy to shatter workers’ pay and conditions, placing the company on a competitive footing with Amazon and other global logistics giants. These gentlemen have their strategy; unfortunately, postal workers do not have theirs.
While militant strike action is important, it will not work on its win this dispute. The bureaucracy fears postal workers will start unofficial strikes to protect themselves from Royal Mail attacks. This struggle is at a crossroads. To win it, postal workers must break the stranglehold of the CWU bureaucracy and set up rank-and-file committees, which will take the strike out of the hands of the union bureaucracy. They must link their struggle with other sections of workers, such as railway workers. The demand must be raised for the nationalisation of Royal Mail, the seizure of its vast profits and its conversion into a public utility under the democratic control of the working class.
“Once a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Czeslaw Milosz
“I won’t talk about my family.” Vigdis Hjorth
“I object greatly to this taking people’s lives and putting them into fiction. And then a famous author who resents critics for saying that he doesn’t make things up”. Deception, Phillip Roth
A novel that combines “reality fiction” and metafiction is difficult to pull off. Hjorth’s novel is an absorbing read. It exposes the treachery of Norway’s Social Democratic party’s attempt to privatise its postal service and integrate it fully into its capitalist economic system.
It has to be said that Long Live the Post Horn is one of the few novels about the postal service. Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 comes to mind, as does Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, which reviewers of Hjorth’s book have ignored.
Hjorth, born in 1959, is a prolific author of over 20 novels and is well-known in her own country, although not as renowned abroad. However, her latest book, Is Mother Dead, is changing that. Long Live the Post Horn! (2012) is the third of her books translated into English by the superb Charlotte Barslund. The surreal cover of Long Live the Post Horn! was designed by Rumors. It is beautiful and was included on a BuzzFeed News list of “the most beautiful book covers of 2020”. All major media publications extensively reviewed the novel.
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Makenna Goodman wrote of Long Live the Post Horn! that it was “a familiar exposition of capital and commodity” and argued that “Hjorth manages to make it feel urgent in a new way” and that her writing style was “neat and direct, even when it becomes circuitous” and concluded that “a novel like Long Live the Post Horn! does not come around often enough.”
The book’s main character is Ellinor, a PR consultant who decides to take on the European Union [EU] and the Norwegian Social Democratic Party’s attempt to privatise the postal network. While exposing the treachery of the Social Democrats, the novel glorifies the trade unions, which in the modern period have collaborated with big business as much as the European Labour Parties.
During a recent book launch of Hjorth’s new book Is Mother dead, she chilling recounts that one of the leading Social Democratic politicians mentioned in the book was killed in the July 22, 2011, massacre at a social-democratic summer camp organised by the youth division of the Labour Party, where 69 people were brutally killed, by the fascist Anders Breivik.[1]
During the same meeting, Hjorth was brutally honest about how writing about her family in her novels had deeply affected her mental health. Hjorth writes about being in psychoanalysis, “What is interesting, when you go to see an analyst, you find out how many lies you have in your story about yourself,” she says. “Often, you survive because you have these lies. But still, you have to get rid of those lies even though you have survived by telling them to yourself. And that’s a painful process. I think that people who have been in psychoanalysis learn not to lie as much as they did before. So, like we are talking here now, my mind might be thinking, ‘Ah, Vigdis, Is this right? Are you lying now? Is this how you like to see it? OK, be honest.’ So you learn the technique of communicating with yourself.”
Her novel Will and Testament provoked a lawsuit from her own family, and her sister then wrote her book in response to Hjorth’s. According to Hjorth.”Most families have a kind of official family story,” This is how we do Christmas’, and so on. If one member does not share this official, nice story, there is a big tension. I think I have given a voice to that person who has a more complex story who is not prepared to be part of it. The family won’t listen to her, and there is a great deal of unpleasantness.”
She suggests a long tradition in Norwegian fiction, especially among female writers, to expose the dark underbelly of family life. “I think literally the first sentence that Sigrid Undset, our Nobel prize winner, wrote, in her first book was ‘I have been unfaithful to my husband’,” she says, with a laugh. “So it was always there.” The desire for truth-telling emerges, perhaps, from a particular sameness in Norwegian family life, she adds. “I think in England for example the difference between rich and poor has always been big and especially now. And so there are lots of versions of family life. In Norway I think we are more equal in generally. And I think when everyone is living the same way, people compare all the time. It makes them look from behind the curtains at their neighbours.”
Hjorth’s honesty has deeply affected her readers as well as the people who translate her novels, with Charlotte Barslund writing, “When I translate a novel, I am always conscious of the place where it takes off and the place where it lands. Will its themes resonate with its new readers who bring their own experiences to a novel conceived in another country? Since I was commissioned to translate Is Mother Dead two years ago, I have become increasingly aware of how many instances of family estrangement exist both among people I know and outside my circle. Hjorth’s thoughtful, honest and razor-sharp analysis of estrangement has left me with a sense of profound sadness and a desperate plea for compassion, humility and tolerance. There has to be another way than cutting people out of your life if they don’t share your truth. Is Mother Dead shows us that there are no winners in the intergenerational battle”?
From a philosophical standpoint, Hjorth is deeply influenced by the work of Soren Kierkegaard. The title of Vigdis Hjorth’s novel, Long Live the Post Horn!, is taken from Soren Kierkegaard’s work, Repetition, in which the 19th-century Danish philosopher cites the post horn. The horn was used in Norway to announce the coming of the mail. It must be said that Kierkegaard is not a healthy influence on Hjorth’s work.
In a critical review of Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography by Joachim Garff, Tom Carter writes, “Kierkegaard, whose major works include Fear and Trembling, Either-Or, and From the Papers of One Still Living, remains a major figure in philosophy. He is one of the principal authors of some of the most prevalent philosophical positions in academia today, which include the rejection of reason, science and the Enlightenment, and, above all, a rejection of the unity of reason and reality, which is a rejection of the possibility of science. Kierkegaard saw no correlation between universal essence and individual existence—between the law-governed processes of the objective world and the perceptive and cognitive faculties of the individual. Moreover, he denied that such a correlation was achievable.”[2]
Unlike Kierkegaard, Hjorth does see a connection between universal essence and individual existence. This does not make her a socialist or anti-capitalist, but it gives her a deeper insight into the problems millions of workers face worldwide. As a teacher, Hjorth worked with people who had no papers or were refugees, and this empathy with working people imbues her work. Her new book deserves a wide readership, and her previous work should be re-examined.
I went to two events last week. The first was Vigdis Hjorth discussing her new book, Is Mother Dead, at the London Review of Books shop. Since I have read only one book by this prolific Norwegian writer, I will not comment too much except to write that I am working on a review of her excellent book, Long Live the Post Horn.
The second event was held at the Institute of Historical Research. The meeting was held to announce the soon-to-be publication of the Writings of Oliver Cromwell. It was disappointing that most academic communities ignored such an important event. The conference itself was put in a grubby room with no sign on the door, and more importantly, no wine was on show. If Oxford University Press is reading this, a review copy would not go a miss or at least produce a paperback copy that you do not have to sell an organ to afford. John Morrill leader of the team that carried out the new collection has a new biography of Oliver Cromwell coming out in 2023. By all accounts it will be a new revisionist assessment of the leader of the English revolution.
Monday of this week, I listened to an excellent lecture by John Rees- The Fiery Spirits and the coming of the English Revolution. Convened by the beautiful Sophie Aldred. It is part of the Britain in Revolution series held online at the University of Oxford. John’s book on the same subject will be released by Verso next year.
According to his university web page, “John Rees is researching the republicans and regicides of the Long Parliament, 1640-1650, in preparation for a second major book on the English Revolution. This will develop the argument of The Leveller Revolution (Verso, 2016) that the proclamation of the Republic and the execution of Charles I resulted from a political bloc fashioned by the radical Independents and the Leveller movement. The long parliament’s so-called ‘fiery spirits’ often had personal and family histories opposing the Stuart monarchy. Examining these will give us an insight into the causes of the English Revolution. The study will focus on the careers of four of the most prominent fiery spirits, the MPs Henry Marten, William Strode, Peter Wentworth, and Alexander Rigby.”
A recent visit to my favourite bookshop in London, Judd Books, yielded some new books that I might or might not read. Witness to the German Revolution-Victor Serge. Doing History from the Bottom Up-Staughton Lynd. Miles-by Miles Davis. The Philosophy of Modern Song Hardcover – 1 Nov. 2022by Bob Dylan. I hope to review this book when it is released.
CT sent me an interesting book- Sergei Kondratiev’s book on the English Revolution (translated from Russian by Google). If anyone wants a pdf copy I will send it via email.
A Trumpet of Sedition 