Paul Greengrass’s The Uprising marks the first major effort by a contemporary director to portray a key mass uprising in medieval Europe: the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. This is noteworthy because the film industry has traditionally focused on the dramas of monarchs, aristocrats, and court factions. At the same time, moments of direct action by the oppressed have often been marginal or considered too risky to explore. Greengrass’s ambitious, sometimes uneven film highlights the lasting significance of 1381 and exposes the deep ideological concerns of today’s cultural establishment.

The revolt of 1381 stands as one of the earliest and most intense displays of popular anger against feudal exploitation. Thousands of peasants, artisans, and labourers marched to London, freed prisoners, executed despised officials, and occupied the capital for several days. This mass uprising exhibited remarkable courage and clarity, fueled by oppressive taxation, the repercussions of the Black Death, and the strict hierarchies of feudal society. However, films have seldom portrayed it. This is no accident; bourgeois cinema often favours stories about kings and nobles, portrays conflict as personal drama, and tends to shy away from depicting collective action by oppressed groups. Such portrayal challenges social order, legitimacy, and class structures.

Greengrass’s film opens powerfully, depicting the harshness of feudal taxation and how personal suffering sparks collective anger. Andrew Garfield’s Ploughman, Jamie Bell’s John Ball, and Cosmo Jarvis’s Wat Tyler are depicted with seriousness and dignity. Ball’s egalitarian sermon, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” preserves its radical impact. Greengrass recognises that the rebellion was not a conspiracy but a spontaneous outburst of class rage, illustrating a society pushed to its limits.

The film accurately depicts that, initially, the rebels did not oppose the king. They believed Richard II was a just ruler, misled by corrupt advisers. This idea of the “good king” was common among peasant groups and, as Engels later noted in his analysis of the 1525 German Peasant War, reflected the structural position of peasants in feudal society. Spread out in villages, bound to the land, without a unified plan, they could rally heroically but lacked a vision for a new social system. Their tragedy was not naivety but real-world limitations.

The film struggles in its latter half. Once the rebels take over the king’s council, Greengrass shows the night descending into looting and random violence. The camera increasingly focuses on the palace window view, portraying the crowd as an irrational, frightening force. The deliberate, calculated violence by the ruling class is seen as treachery, rooted in personal betrayal, whereas the violence by the oppressed is depicted as chaos. This reflects a typical liberal view of revolution—sympathising with the oppressed while simultaneously fearing their autonomous actions.

The studio made a decisive change just three weeks before the release, renaming the film as The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood. This new title drew on a brief epilogue showing the Ploughman wearing a green hood and ambushing the king in Sherwood Forest. This connection of Robin Hood to the events of 1381 is not just a marketing tactic, but reflects an ideological shift. It shifts focus from collective resistance to individual heroism, replacing mass activism with personal rebellion. Clearly, the studio decided that portraying a collective uprising against exploitation wouldn’t attract enough viewers.

Greengrass’s film, despite its strengths, struggles to resolve its perspective on the rebellion it portrays fully. It sympathises with the peasants’ pursuit of justice but is uncomfortable with their tactics. The film begins with a serious historical tone and ends in a mythic way. The key lesson from 1381 emphasises the importance of the oppressed taking independent action, rather than outlaws like those in Sherwood Forest- a message that remains relevant today.

A society strained to the breaking point.

Greengrass begins The Uprising after the Black Death, the devastating pandemic that killed half of England’s population and disrupted social order. Few modern films have depicted the scale of this upheaval. The plague did more than reduce the population; it challenged the very ideology of feudal society. Labour shortages threatened landowners’ economic dominance, wages increased, and the ruling class responded with repression—implementing wage controls, raising taxes, and trying to keep peasants tied to the land. Greengrass’s opening scenes, where young King Richard II and the nobles and clergy decide that the Church and merchants cannot be taxed, so the burden falls on peasants, embody the core principle of class rule. The elite protects itself, shifting the crisis’s costs downward. Today’s workers recognise this pattern.

Andrew Garfield’s Ploughman symbolically echoes Langland’s Piers Plowman, an allegorical poem about social injustice and moral defiance. He begins by burying his family, victims of the plague. The tax collector insists he pays “death taxes’ again, citing missing documentation. The scene highlights bureaucratic cruelty- cold, impersonal, and typical of a system where the poor must constantly justify their existence to the wealthy. Greengrass depicts village girls being humiliated, forced to strip so soldiers can verify their taxable age, in a straightforward manner that avoids sensationalism. This serves as a stark reminder that feudal exploitation was real, enforced through physical control, surveillance, and looming violence.

The film’s most powerful moments are in its early sequences. Greengrass excels at capturing the moment when personal suffering transforms into collective outrage as individual grievances, long suppressed, resonate with others’ experiences. The rebellion ignites not through conspiracy or manipulation but because of the unbearable burden of exploitation. A single act of defiance sparks in a landscape full of flammable material. This portrayal is historically accurate. The Peasants’ Revolt wasn’t premeditated; it broke out unexpectedly. It stemmed from years of accumulated resentment, intensified by the poll tax and harsh enforcement tactics.

Jamie Bell’s portrayal of John Ball and Cosmo Jarvis’s Wat Tyler captures the revolt’s historical leadership. Ball, a radical priest whose sermons energised the countryside, is depicted with seriousness and conviction. His well-known statement, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” maintains its powerful call for equality. It stands as one of the earliest clear assertions of human equality challenging divine hierarchy. Greengrass lets this line stand out without adornment. In a society that saw hierarchy as natural and divine, Ball’s words directly challenge the ideological roots of feudalism.

Jarvis’s Tyler, a seasoned soldier, appears disciplined, focused, and politically aware. While not a proto-revolutionary in the modern sense, he understands the stakes. The film portrays Tyler and Ball collaborating to bring coherence to the revolt, articulate demands, organise the march on London, and contain some of the crowd’s more destructive tendencies. This depiction is grounded in history. The revolt was not without leadership; rather, it lacked a class able to maintain political organisation beyond the immediate crisis.

Greengrass’s portrayal of the march on London stands out as one of the film’s greatest achievements. The rebels appear purposeful rather than chaotic and angry rather than reckless. The scenes of prison openings, the burning of John of Gaunt’s palace, and the execution of the Archbishop of Canterbury are depicted as acts of political justice, not mere random violence. For several days, the insurgents effectively control the capital. The film highlights the remarkable fact that Europe’s most rigidly hierarchical society was temporarily upended from below.

Greengrass’s portrayal captures the sense of possibility often missing in many historical dramas. The peasants, artisans, and labourers who marched on London weren’t just reacting to oppression; they were asserting their agency. They believed—though mistakenly—that they could appeal to the king, achieve justice, and make the world fairer. These illusions were structural rather than psychological, rooted in their worldview. As Engels later noted in his study of the German Peasant War of 1525, while the peasantry could rise heroically, they couldn’t, on their own, establish a new social order. Their fragmented, local existence and dependence on the monarchy limited their broader ambitions.

Greengrass’s initial sequences, marked by clarity and seriousness, nearly recognise this reality. They depict a society in turmoil, with a ruling class intent on maintaining its privileges and a mass of oppressed individuals realising their collective power. These moments bring The Uprising close to true historical understanding—before the film’s subsequent ideological withdrawal into fear, chaos, and eventually myth.

Illusions in the monarchy and their tragic consequences

Greengrass correctly highlights that the rebels initially did not oppose King Richard II. They regarded him as just but were deceived by malicious advisors. This trust in the “good king” was not naïve but reflected the peasantry’s social position within feudal society. As peasants spread across countless villages, connected to the land and without any national organization, they could stage significant and heroic revolts but struggled to envision a new social structure. Their demands to abolish serfdom, end feudal dues, and dismantle legal ties to the land were radical, yet articulated within feudal ideas. They looked to the monarch as a defender of justice, not as the system’s. This text emphasises Engels’ key political insight from the German Peasants’ War of 1525, which applies to 1381 as well. It highlights that while the peasantry can overthrow feudalism through a courageous, widespread uprising, they cannot establish a new order. Engels explained that the tragedy wasn’t their lack of bravery or clarity, but the social constraints they faced. Their local focus, land dependence, and loyalty to the monarchy prevented them from forming a sustainable plan to succeed beyond destroying the old system.

Greengrass stages the betrayal of the rebels with considerable dramatic force. At Mile End, Richard II promises sweeping concessions: the abolition of serfdom, freedom of labour, and the redress of grievances. The rebels disperse, believing they have won. The film captures the extraordinary moment when Europe’s most rigidly hierarchical society seemed on the brink of transformation. But the promises were a calculated deception. Once the rebels had returned home, the king revoked every concession. The ruling class acted with cold calculation, not treachery born of emotion but treachery born of class necessity. The feudal order could not survive the fulfilment of the rebels’ demands; therefore, the rebels had to be destroyed.

The depiction of Wat Tyler’s death at Smithfield emphasises its brutality. While negotiating with the king, Tyler is unexpectedly killed. This scene symbolises more than personal betrayal; it reaffirms feudal authority. Tyler’s death signifies the fall of the revolt’s leaders and the start of a counter-revolution. John Ball, a radical priest known for his inspiring sermons, is captured and executed—hanged, drawn, and quartered. In response, hundreds of rebels are executed nationwide. Greengrass highlights how this repression is methodical: rather than panic, the ruling class restores order through terror.

One of the film’s strengths is its clear portrayal of betrayal. It illustrates that the ruling class won the revolt not with better arguments or morals but through violence and deception. However, Greengrass does not fully explore the political implications. The betrayal was not accidental; it was inevitable. The peasantry’s trust in the king was rooted in their class ideology, which could not yet act independently of the monarchy. Their defeat stemmed from structural constraints, not personal errors.

In this sense, The Uprising brushes against a significant historical truth but doesn’t fully reach it. The 1381 revolt was one of medieval Europe’s major mass uprisings, yet it failed because its leadership couldn’t go beyond the social system they aimed to challenge. Greengrass highlights this betrayal; Engels clarifies why it was inevitable. The film’s most powerful scenes hint at this understanding, though later parts shy away from exploring these deeper implications.

The descent into “mob” framing

The film struggles in its second half. After the rebels take the king’s council- a rare moment in medieval European history when society’s lowest classes briefly control political power- Greengrass shows the night descending into looting, drunkenness, and random violence. The Ploughman, Tyler, and Ball are horrified, trying to control what the film repeatedly calls, whether explicitly or implicitly, the “mob.” This change is sudden and revealing. What was once shown as a disciplined, purposeful crowd suddenly appears as an uncontrollable force of nature. The leaders must restrain the crowd to prevent it from self-destructing.

There was violence in 1381, including xenophobic attacks on Flemish immigrants. No serious historian denies this. But the framing matters. Greengrass’s camera increasingly adopts the palace window’s viewpoint: the masses as an unpredictable, terrifying presence, a dark tide threatening to engulf civilisation. The king’s nightmares of “demons”, grotesque, contorted figures emerging from the shadows, become a recurring visual motif. What begins as the subjective fear of a frightened monarch becomes, through repetition and framing, a perspective the film itself partially endorses. The rebels’ seizure of power is not shown as a moment of political possibility but as a descent into chaos.

Liberal filmmaking on revolution often shows sympathy for the oppressed but also reveals a fear of their independence. The oppressed are allowed to suffer, endure, and seek justice, yet when they act together, the camera withdraws. Their collective agency appears threatening, and their violence— even if aimed at their own exploiters—is viewed as disorderly. In contrast, violence by the ruling class—systematic, calculated, and much larger in scale—is seen as legitimate. Treachery is often seen as individual dishonesty rather than a systemic flaw.

This distinction is ideological, not based on fact. In 1381, the ruling class acted with cold strategic intent. Richard II’s promises at Mile End were a calculated deception, meant to scatter the rebels and enable their slaughter. Tyler’s murder at Smithfield was not a tragic mistake but a premeditated killing. The subsequent reprisals—hundreds executed, villages terrorised, leaders hunted—were not random chaos but organised violence by a class defending its authority. However, Greengrass describes this violence as “betrayal,” a moral failing, while portraying the violence of the oppressed as “mob rule,” a natural disaster.

This inversion is key to bourgeois ideology. It shapes how revolutions are usually shown: rulers are portrayed as rational, even if cruel; the masses are seen as emotional, even when justified. The oppressed are granted dignity only while passive. When they act, they become threatening. The latter part of the film exposes the limits of Greengrass’s political vision. He can show exploitation, suffering, and righteous anger, but he struggles to portray the masses as active agents in history rather than unpredictable mobs.

The tragedy is that the 1381 revolt was not chaotic. It was organised, purposeful, and politically consistent within its class perspective. Its violence mainly targeted tools of feudal dominance: tax collectors, judges, officials, and aristocratic symbols. Meanwhile, the ruling class’s violence was unchecked and total. Greengrass’s framing flips this reality. This flip is driven not by past events but by ideology: a deep-rooted liberal fear that the oppressed might act outside the authority of the institutions claiming to serve them.

The second half of the film is not just a narrative mistake but also a political setback. It exposes how modern cinema struggles to portray collective action without framing it as a problem. Instead of highlighting a moment of real historical change, the revolt becomes a warning. Both the camera and the ruling class seem to be afraid of the crowd.

The Robin Hood graft: a revealing capitulation

The most remarkable incident happened not on screen but within the marketing team. Just three weeks before the film’s release, the U.S. distributor suddenly changed the title to The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood, citing a short epilogue in which the Ploughman wears a green hood and ambushes the king in Sherwood Forest. The British distributor quickly rejected this change, emphasising that Greengrass’s film was a historical epic about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, not a Robin Hood origin story. Critics called the ending “tacked on” and “damaging,” and they were right. Attaching Robin Hood to 1381 was not just a marketing mistake; it was a revealing political statement.

The rebranding reveals how ideological pressures influence modern filmmaking. The studio apparently decided that depicting a large-scale uprising against exploitation wouldn’t attract audiences. Instead, it relied on well-known “intellectual property,” reflecting the industry’s risk-averse preference for safer content. This shift replaced collective resistance with the narrative of the lone outlaw hero, turning a significant act of political mobilisation into a personal story of defiance. This choice goes beyond marketing; it signals a retreat from the revolt’s true political significance.

Robin Hood embodies the bourgeois fantasy of rebellion, representing a form of revolt that lacks social depth. His defiance is personal and moral rather than based on social or structural change—he steals from the rich but does not question wealth or the social relations that create it. Living in the forest rather than in towns and villages, his struggle is individual rather than historical, making him an admired hero who doesn’t threaten societal assumptions. Essentially, Robin Hood symbolises rebellion without aiming for revolution.

The Peasants’ Revolt stands in contrast. It was a large-scale uprising involving tens of thousands of peasants, artisans, and labourers who marched to London, liberated prisoners, executed despised officials, and occupied the capital for several days. No lone outlaw orchestrated this; it was a collective assertion of the oppressed class’s strength. Its demands—abolishing serfdom, securing labour freedom, and ending feudal dues—challenged the core structures of the social order. Linking Robin Hood to 1381 distorts the revolt’s significance. Such an attempt represents an ideological retreat and a refusal to face the true meaning of mass action.

The epilogue is politically confusing. The Ploughman ambushes the king but then spares him, claiming his group operates “beyond royal authority.” This sentimental gesture replaces the real historical lesson—that the oppressed must act independently of the ruling class—with a romanticised fantasy of noble outlawry. The film originally depicted the peasants’ trust in the king as their downfall, yet it ends by reinforcing the myth it previously criticised. The collective effort of many, defeated by the ruling elite, is overshadowed by the lone hero lurking in the forest. Ultimately, history becomes folklore and politics becomes myth.

The film’s poor box-office performance, earning only $3.3 million against a $20 million budget, indicates that audiences were not convinced. The rebranding failed to expand the film’s appeal and instead compromised its integrity. Viewers saw the disconnect between the revolt’s serious message and the trivial Robin Hood ending. The studio’s panic and distrust of authentic history ultimately harmed the film it was trying to preserve.

The Robin Hood graft exemplifies modern cinema’s ideological boundaries. While the industry can portray suffering, injustice, and rebellion, it confines these elements within familiar narrative structures. When faced with real mass action, cinema turns to myth. Greengrass’s film, despite its merits, is limited by these constraints, starting with history and ending with legend, and unable to uphold the revolt’s true political significance.

Contemporary resonance and contemporary limits

Some reviewers have noted the film’s relevance to today: a society recovering from the pandemic, with elites growing wealthier while workers endure austerity, inflation, and escalating war costs. These similarities are evident. The social landscape of 2026, much like that of 1381, is characterised by stark inequality, political distrust, and a ruling class eager to shift the fallout of its crises onto the populace. Widespread unrest shows up in strikes, protests, and growing anger over living conditions. It’s easy to understand why the Peasants’ Revolt inspired Greengrass and why the film’s initial scenes strike such a chord.

Greengrass rightly earns praise for recognising the importance of 1381 and persisting through years of production and cast changes to bring the film to life. He stands out as one of the few modern directors willing to seriously confront issues of state violence and large-scale political movements. Garfield, Bell, and Jarvis deliver earnest performances, and the film’s first half is marked by clarity, urgency, and a sincere effort to understand the revolt on its own terms. However, The Uprising ultimately struggles to decide its stance on the rebellion it portrays. It sympathises with the peasants’ pursuit of justice but feels uneasy about their tactics. The film starts with Engels’s observation that the peasantry could rise heroically but could not, alone, create a new social order, yet it shifts away from this, fading into myth and liberal worry.

The film’s failure to portray oppressed characters acting independently highlights more than just an artistic flaw; it reveals the ideological boundaries of modern cinema. Bourgeois filmmaking can show suffering, injustice, and even rebellion, but only when these elements stay within familiar storytelling structures. When the masses act collectively, gain power, or challenge the current order, the camera pulls back. In these moments, the crowd becomes a “mob,” individual agency dissolves into chaos, and historical events turn into warnings. Greengrass’s film exemplifies this tendency: it starts with the potential for mass action but concludes with the fantasy of a lone outlaw.

The Robin Hood graft exemplifies this retreat most clearly. The studio’s panic—believing that the true history of a mass uprising wouldn’t attract audiences—exposes a deep ideological unease with collective resistance. The film’s ending, where the Ploughman spares the king and claims his group is “beyond royal authority,” isn’t genuinely political but an outright avoidance of politics. It replaces the lessons of 1381 with a romantic act that leaves issues unresolved.

The lessons of 1381 are not about outlaws in Sherwood Forest but highlight the importance of the oppressed acting independently of the ruling class and its promises. The peasants’ tragedy was not due to a lack of courage but to their misplaced trust in the monarchy, which was based on the fixed social limitations they faced. Their defeat was inevitable: the ruling class responded with calculated strategies, while the peasants lacked the organisation and ideological resources to continue the fight.

The enduring question today is whether the oppressed act independently of the institutions that claim to represent them, especially amid growing inequality, authoritarianism, and war. Greengrass’s film hints at this truth but ultimately pulls back. The true history of 1381, however, cannot be fully understood in Sherwood Forest; it calls for a direct challenge to the social order—an unresolved confrontation.

Articles and Bibliography

Marxist and Theoretical Works

• Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany. The foundational Marxist analysis of peasant uprisings, indispensable for understanding the structural limitations of rural revolts and the class dynamics that doomed them.
• Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (sections on primitive accumulation) For the broader context of feudal dissolution, the emergence of capitalist relations, and the role of coercion in restructuring labour.
• Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (Ch. 1–3): Not directly about 1381, but essential for grasping the Marxist method of analysing mass movements, class agency, and the difference between spontaneous revolt and organised revolutionary leadership.
• George Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: For the theoretical distinction between class “in itself” and class “for itself,” crucial for understanding why the peasantry could revolt but not reorganise society.

Primary and Medieval Sources

• Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana: A contemporary chronicler whose hostile account nonetheless provides detailed descriptions of the events of 1381.
• Jean Froissart, Chroniques: Offers a vivid aristocratic perspective on the revolt, revealing elite anxieties about mass action.
• Langland, Piers Ploughman: The literary backdrop to the Ploughman figure; a major source for understanding popular religious dissent and proto‑egalitarian sentiment.
• The Anonimalle Chronicle: One of the most detailed accounts of the negotiations at Mile End and Smithfield.

Modern Historical Scholarship on 1381

• Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381. The classic Marxist history of the revolt. Essential for its analysis of class structure, feudal exploitation, and the political consciousness of the rebels.
• Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: For the economic pressures that shaped peasant life and contributed to the revolt.
• Alastair Dunn, The Great Rising of 1381: A modern narrative history with strong archival grounding.
• Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer. Useful for understanding the ideological climate of late‑14th‑century England and elite responses to popular unrest.
• Justine Firnhaber‑Baker, The Jacquerie of 1358: A comparative study of another major peasant uprising, illuminating the structural similarities across Europe.

On Feudalism, Class Structure, and Revolt

• Marc Bloch, Feudal Society: A foundational work on the social and economic structures of medieval Europe.
• E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class: Not medieval, but indispensable for understanding how class agency develops historically- a contrast to the peasantry’s structural limitations.
• Guy Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism: For the broader European context of feudal decline and peasant resistance.

Film, Ideology, and Representation

• John Newsinger, “Revolution and the Cinema” (various essays): Marxist analyses of how film treats mass uprisings and class struggle.
• Peter Watkins, interviews on La Commune (Paris 1871): Watkins’s reflections on why mainstream cinema fears collective agency are directly relevant to Greengrass’s retreat into “mob” framing.
• Michael Wayne, Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique: For a theoretical framework on how bourgeois aesthetics constrains depictions of mass political action.
• WSWS Arts Reviews on Les Misérables, Judas and the Black Messiah, Bloody Sunday: Parallel analyses of how liberal filmmaking oscillates between sympathy for the oppressed and fear of their independent action.

On Robin Hood Mythmaking

• J.C. Holt, Robin Hood: The definitive scholarly study of the outlaw myth, useful for understanding why Hollywood prefers Robin Hood’s individualised rebellion to the collective politics of 1381.
• Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography. Explores how the legend has been repeatedly reshaped to fit bourgeois ideological needs.

The publication of Rachel Foxley’s The Levellers marks a significant moment in English Revolution historiography. It is the first monograph devoted exclusively to the Leveller movement since H. N. Brailsford’s The Levellers and the English Revolution (1961), and this half-century gap is itself historiographically revealing. The absence of sustained scholarly engagement with the Levellers cannot be attributed to a lack of archival material or interpretive difficulty. Rather, it reflects the political and intellectual realignments that have reshaped academic history since the late twentieth century. The Levellers’ marginalisation has accompanied the rise of revisionist approaches that seek to separate political thought from social conflict, limit the scope of revolutionary agency, and displace class analysis from the centre of historical explanation. In this sense, the historiographical silence surrounding the Levellers reflects a broader ideological shift within the discipline.

Foxley’s opening chapter, aptly titled “The Levellers and the Historians,” acknowledges this context with admirable clarity. She observes that revisionist scholars “have questioned almost every aspect of the historical reputation of the Levellers” (p. 3), from the coherence of their political programme to the extent of their influence within the New Model Army. Her study is thus situated within a long-running historiographical dispute- one that has, in effect, constituted a British Historikerstreit over the nature of radicalism, republicanism, and political agency in the 1640s. Although Foxley does not explicitly present her work as a polemical intervention in this debate, her analysis inevitably engages with it, and her conclusions challenge several entrenched assumptions of the revisionist orthodoxy.

Foxley’s intervention becomes clearer when set against the intellectual climate in which revisionism emerged. Beginning with G. R. Elton and consolidated by scholars such as Conrad Russell, John Morrill, and Mark Kishlansky, revisionism rejected the structural and class-based interpretations advanced by Marxist historians including Christopher Hill and Brian Manning. Rather than emphasising social conflict, revisionists focused on constitutional crisis, administrative breakdown, religious sensibilities, and the contingent decisions of political elites. The Levellers, whose programme articulated demands for popular sovereignty, legal reform, and political accountability, sat uneasily within this framework. Their radicalism was minimised, reinterpreted as derivative, or dismissed as marginal. As a result, historiography often presents the Levellers as episodic actors rather than a coherent political movement.

Foxley’s study challenges this reduction. By emphasising the intellectual originality of Leveller political thought, she shows that their arguments cannot be dismissed as mere extensions of Independent or sectarian discourse. Her analysis of the Agreement of the People, the petitioning campaigns of 1646–49, and the ideological exchanges surrounding the Putney Debates reveals a movement capable of sustained organisation and theoretical innovation. In doing so, she reopens questions that revisionism had prematurely closed: the relationship between political ideas and social forces, the extent of popular mobilisation, and the ideological diversity within the parliamentarian coalition.

At the same time, Foxley’s work reflects the constraints of the historiographical environment in which it was produced. Her emphasis on political theory, rather than the class dynamics shaping Leveller activity, partly aligns her with post-revisionist tendencies. She places the Levellers within a broad parliamentarian milieu and, while cautioning against dissolving them into an undifferentiated political world, does not fully articulate the structural tensions that defined their position within the revolutionary process. This unresolved tension between recognising Leveller distinctiveness and situating them within a wider coalition marks the limits of her intervention.

Nevertheless, The Levellers makes a major contribution to the field. It restores the movement to the centre of debates on political thought during the English Revolution and challenges the revisionist minimisation of radical agency. In doing so, Foxley’s study helps correct a long-standing imbalance in the historiography and reasserts the Levellers’ importance in shaping the political imagination of the 1640s.

Revisionism and Its Discontents

Foxley’s relationship with revisionist scholarship is complex and, in many respects, emblematic of the broader tensions that have shaped English Civil War historiography over the past half-century. On the one hand, she challenges the more reductive claims advanced by scholars such as Gary De Krey, whose critique focuses on the chronology and coherence of Leveller organisation. De Krey argues that the term “Leveller” emerged only in late 1647 and, therefore, that no identifiable movement existed before then.

This insistence on terminological precision leads him to reduce the political developments of 1645–47 to a series of contingent alliances, obscuring the ideological continuity and strategic coherence that Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn were already shaping. As the review notes, “Movements do not wait for their opponents to name them before they exist.” Foxley’s readiness to identify a Leveller movement before it was formally named therefore challenges revisionist scepticism and signals her refusal to regard political identity as purely retrospective.

Yet Foxley’s resistance to revisionism is not absolute. Her methodological focus on political theory, rather than on the social forces that produced and sustained it, places her partly alongside post-revisionist approaches that seek to combine ideological analysis with a more pluralistic understanding of political culture. She locates the Levellers within a broad parliamentarian milieu, emphasising the fluidity of alliances and the permeability of ideological boundaries. This approach enables her to highlight the Levellers’ intellectual originality without artificially separating them from the wider political world in which they operated. At the same time, she warns against “dissolving them into an undifferentiated part of that complex political world” (p. 6), demonstrating her awareness of the dangers of excessive integration. The Levellers were neither mere Independents nor simply one faction among many; they articulated a distinctive political programme that cannot be reduced to the sum of their alliances.

The tension between these positions, however, remains unresolved. Foxley’s analysis does not fully articulate the class character of Leveller politics or the structural limits that shaped its trajectory. Her focus on political argumentation, petitions, pamphlets, and constitutional proposals illuminates the intellectual creativity of Leveller thought but leaves the social base that enabled it underexplored.

The Levellers drew their support mainly from artisans, apprentices, small producers, and sections of London’s lower middle strata, as well as those of other urban centres. These groups held distinctive economic interests and political expectations that shaped Leveller demands for legal reform, popular sovereignty, and magistrate accountability. Without placing Leveller ideology in this social context, the movement can appear as a free-floating constellation of ideas rather than a political expression of specific class forces.

This omission becomes more apparent when Foxley examines the structural limits of Leveller influence. She acknowledges the hostility of the army grandees and political elite. Still, she does not fully consider why Leveller demands became intolerable to the propertied classes that ultimately shaped the post-revolutionary settlement. The suppression of the Levellers in 1649 resulted not simply from ideological disagreement or personal animosity, but from a class struggle within the revolutionary camp, as the interests of small producers collided with those of landowners, merchants, and military commanders. By failing to foreground these dynamics, Foxley’s account risks underestimating the material constraints that defined both the possibilities and the limits of Leveller radicalism.

In this sense, Foxley’s work occupies an intermediate position within the historiographical landscape. She challenges revisionist minimisation of Leveller coherence and influence, but does not fully adopt the class-centred analyses advanced by Marxist historians such as Hill, Manning, or Slaughter. Her study thus serves both as a corrective to revisionist reductionism and as an expression of the post-revisionist reluctance to engage directly with the structural determinants of political action. This duality is not a flaw, but a marker of the historiographical moment in which her work was produced, a moment characterised by methodological pluralism, theoretical caution, and an ongoing effort to reconcile political ideas with social forces.

The Intellectual Originality of Leveller Thought

One of the major strengths of Foxley’s study is its demonstration of the originality and intellectual coherence of Leveller political thought. Against the long-standing revisionist tendency to depict the Levellers as derivative or merely reactive, Foxley convincingly argues that their political language was neither a simple extension of Independent polemic nor an improvised response to the accelerating crises of the late 1640s. Instead, she shows how Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn, and their associates forged a distinctive idiom that combined scriptural references, historical analogies, and emergent secular reasoning in unprecedented ways within English political discourse. Their pamphlets, petitions, and constitutional proposals reveal a sustained effort to theorise political authority, liberty, and representation at a moment when inherited frameworks were collapsing. As contemporaries recognised, the Levellers were the revolution’s ideologues, seeking to make sense of unprecedented political developments with the intellectual resources available to them.

Foxley’s analysis is especially effective in showing that Leveller thought cannot be reduced to the religious idioms through which it was often expressed. While recognising scripture’s pervasive influence on seventeenth-century political argument, she demonstrates that the Levellers used biblical language strategically rather than dogmatically. Their appeals to “freeborn rights,” “the laws of nature,” and “the people’s consent” were not simply theological extensions, but elements of a broader shift toward secularised political reasoning. In this respect, Foxley challenges interpretations that trace Leveller radicalism exclusively to congregational practice or covenant theology. Instead, she places their political creativity within a wider intellectual transformation that was beginning to separate political and social questions from scriptural authority.

It is important to place this intellectual creativity within a broader European context. The erosion of scriptural authority after the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus (1543), followed by the work of Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, destabilised the cosmological foundations on which medieval political thought had rested. As scientific inquiry undermined the Ptolemaic universe and challenged the epistemological supremacy of biblical revelation, new forms of political reasoning became possible. The Levellers were neither scientists nor consciously involved in the scientific revolution, but they operated in an intellectual environment increasingly receptive to secular explanations. Their arguments for popular sovereignty, legal accountability, and political equality reflect this shift. They belonged to a generation beginning, however tentatively, to seek answers to political and social problems beyond the confines of theological orthodoxy.

In this sense, Leveller thought anticipates aspects of the Enlightenment. Their insistence that political authority derives from the people rather than divine sanction, emphasis on rational law over arbitrary power, and belief in the universality of certain rights all foreshadow developments in eighteenth-century political philosophy. At the same time, their critique of oligarchic power and defence of small producers and artisans echo themes later adopted by socialist thinkers. It would be anachronistic to describe the Levellers as proto-Marxists, and Foxley avoids such simplifications. Nevertheless, their political language contains early elements of later democratic and egalitarian traditions, showing that the intellectual genealogy of modern radicalism cannot be confined to the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.

Foxley’s contribution, therefore, is not merely to rehabilitate the Levellers as significant actors in the English Revolution but to restore the intellectual depth of their political project. By situating their ideas within both the immediate revolutionary context and the longer trajectory of European thought, she shows that Leveller radicalism was neither accidental nor derivative. It was a creative and historically consequential attempt to rethink the foundations of political authority at a moment when the old world was collapsing and a new one struggling to be born.

A Movement with a Mass Audience

Foxley’s analysis of Leveller mobilisation is one of the most empirically substantial and historiographically consequential elements of her study. Against the revisionist tendency to minimise the movement’s organisational capacity and popular resonance, she reconstructs a pattern of sustained political activity that demonstrates the Levellers’ ability to reach, mobilise, and coordinate large numbers of supporters across London and beyond. Her discussion of the Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (July 1646) is particularly illuminating. She identifies it as “the first Leveller text to claim a mass following” (p. 36), and treats it not as rhetorical exaggeration but as evidence of a developing political constituency. By foregrounding this document, Foxley challenges the assumption common among conservative historians that Leveller radicalism was confined to a narrow circle of pamphleteers and sectaries. Instead, she shows that by mid‑1646 the Levellers were already articulating demands that resonated widely among artisans, apprentices, small producers, and politically conscious segments of the urban population.

Her use of recent scholarship on petitioning and print culture further strengthens this argument. The figures she cites- 30,000 copies of a petition printed in January 1648, 98,000 signatures on a later Remonstrance, 20,000 copies of the Agreement of the People distributed free, and 10,000 signatures on the women’s petition of March 1649- are striking not only for their scale but for what they reveal about the infrastructure of Leveller mobilisation. These numbers indicate a movement capable of coordinating printers, distributors, ward organisers, and networks of sympathisers across multiple parishes and guild structures. They also suggest that Leveller texts circulated far beyond the immediate circles of their authors, reaching readers who may not have identified formally with the movement but who were receptive to its arguments. In this respect, Foxley’s work undermines the revisionist portrayal of the Levellers as marginal or ephemeral. Instead, she presents them as a dynamic political force whose organisational practices anticipated later forms of mass politics.

Equally important is Foxley’s challenge to the claim that Leveller political ideas were fundamentally religious in origin. While acknowledging the period’s pervasive religious idiom, she argues that “there is simply no need to go hunting in covenant theology or congregational practice for Leveller political ideas of equality or ‘democracy,’ or for a prototype of the Agreement of the People” (p. 9). This intervention matters in a long‑standing historiographical debate. For decades, revisionist scholars have attempted to locate the roots of Leveller radicalism in sectarian ecclesiology, thereby reducing their political programme to an extension of congregationalist church governance. Foxley rejects this reduction. She shows that Leveller arguments for popular sovereignty, legal accountability, and political equality cannot be explained solely, or even primarily, through religious categories. Their political language drew on a wider repertoire: classical republicanism, common law traditions, natural rights discourse, and the emergent secular reasoning that was beginning to reshape European intellectual life.

By disentangling Leveller political thought from narrowly theological explanations, Foxley restores the movement’s intellectual autonomy. She shows that while the Levellers operated within a religious culture, their political arguments were not derivative of it. This distinction matters because it repositions the Levellers within the broader history of political ideas. Rather than treating them as a sectarian offshoot, Foxley presents them as participants in a wider transformation in political reasoning- one that was beginning to detach questions of authority, liberty, and representation from the interpretive monopoly of scripture.

Taken together, Foxley’s analysis of mobilisation and her critique of religious reductionism significantly revise the historiographical landscape. They reveal a movement that was both organisationally sophisticated and intellectually innovative, capable of articulating political demands that resonated across a broad social base. In doing so, she challenges the revisionist minimisation of Leveller significance and restores the movement to its rightful place within the political imagination of the English Revolution.

Levellers and the New Model Army

The chapter on the Levellers’ relationship with the New Model Army constitutes Foxley’s most substantial and consequential historiographical intervention. For more than four decades, revisionist scholars such as Austin Woolrych, John Morrill, and Mark Kishlansky have argued that Leveller influence within the army was limited, episodic, or ideologically incompatible with military discipline. In this view, the army’s political actions in 1647–49 can be explained through institutional grievances, professional honour, and war experience, rather than through the penetration of radical political ideas. Foxley challenges this orthodoxy directly. She highlights the petitioning campaigns of spring 1647, the cooperation between civilian and military radicals, and the striking consistency of demands articulated by Leveller leaders and army agitators. Her analysis demonstrates that Leveller influence was neither accidental nor superficial but formed part of a sustained dialogue between civilian activists and politically conscious soldiers.

Central to Foxley’s argument is her treatment of the Putney Debates. Although constrained by the publisher’s space limitations, her discussion is judicious and incisive. She rejects the revisionist tendency to treat Putney as an isolated episode, a momentary eruption of radicalism unconnected to the army’s broader political development. Instead, she situates the debates within ongoing exchanges among agitators, grandees, and civilian Levellers, showing how the issues raised at Putney had already circulated in petitions, pamphlets, and informal discussions throughout the army. This contextualisation is crucial. It shows that the debates were not an aberration but the culmination of a political process in which soldiers actively engaged with questions of sovereignty, representation, and constitutional settlement.

The review reinforces Foxley’s argument by listing the numerous Levellers who served in the army or maintained close ties with it. Figures such as Edward Sexby, William Allen, Thomas Prince, John Harris, and the Rainsborough brothers demonstrate that Leveller sympathies were not confined to civilian circles. Lilburne’s own military record was widely known, and army chaplains such as Jeremiah Ives and Edward Harrison openly supported Leveller positions. These connections undermine the revisionist assertion that the Levellers were “exterior to the army.” They instead reveal a porous boundary between civilian radicalism and military activism, where ideas, personnel, and organisational practices circulated freely.

Foxley’s conclusion that Putney marked “not the end but the beginning of a potentially fertile alliance between civilian Levellers and army radicals” (p. 158) directly challenges the standard revisionist narrative. Rather than viewing the debates as a moment of radical overreach swiftly contained by Cromwell and Ireton, she interprets them as the opening of a political space in which Leveller ideas could shape the army’s constitutional imagination. This interpretation restores the debates to their proper place within the revolutionary dynamic. It emphasises the agency of rank‑and‑file soldiers, the army’s ideological diversity, and the possibility, however constrained, of a democratic transformation emerging from within the military structure itself.

Foxley’s intervention has broader historiographical implications. By demonstrating the depth of Leveller–army interaction, she challenges the revisionist minimisation of radicalism and reasserts the importance of ideological conflict within the parliamentarian coalition. Her analysis suggests that the army was not merely a professional fighting force but a political institution in which debates about authority, liberty, and representation were actively contested. In doing so, she reopens questions that revisionism had prematurely closed: the extent of popular political consciousness, the relationship between military organisation and political radicalism, and the structural tensions within the revolutionary movement.

In sum, Foxley’s chapter on the army is a major contribution to the field. It dismantles the revisionist portrayal of the Levellers as marginal and restores the New Model Army’s political complexity. By reintegrating Putney into the broader revolutionary process, she offers a more dynamic and historically grounded account of radicalism in the 1640s- one that recognises the army not as a passive institution but as a site of ideological struggle and political possibility.

Class Limits and the Cromwellian Settlement

Where Foxley’s analysis is less satisfactory is in her treatment of the class limits of Leveller politics. Although she acknowledges the hostility of the grandees and the structural pressures facing the movement, she does not fully explore the deeper social dynamics that shaped both the possibilities and the constraints of Leveller radicalism. The Levellers drew their support primarily from artisans, apprentices, small producers, and segments of the lower middle strata groups whose economic interests and political expectations diverged sharply from those of the propertied classes who ultimately determined the trajectory of the post‑revolutionary settlement. This divergence was not incidental. It was rooted in the material conditions of seventeenth‑century England, where the emerging capitalist order was reshaping relations of production, property, and political authority.

The Levellers’ programme- universal male suffrage, equality before the law, accountability of magistrates, and the subordination of rulers to the people- reflected the aspirations of those who were being drawn into the early capitalist labour market yet still retained elements of economic independence. Their demands expressed both a desire to preserve older forms of small‑scale production and a need to articulate new forms of political agency in a rapidly changing society. In this sense, Leveller radicalism was simultaneously forward‑looking and rooted in the social position of its supporters. It advanced democratic ideas but was limited by the class base from which it emerged.

Foxley recognises aspects of this dynamic but does not fully develop its implications. Her emphasis on political theory pamphlets, petitions, and constitutional proposals illuminates the intellectual creativity of Leveller thought but leaves underexplored the structural forces that shaped the movement’s trajectory. The suppression of the Levellers at Burford in May 1649 was not, as the review notes, “an accident of personalities but the outcome of a class struggle within the revolutionary camp.” The grandees, representing the interests of landowners, merchants, and the higher strata of the bourgeoisie, could not tolerate demands that threatened property qualifications, social hierarchy, and the stability of the emerging capitalist order. Cromwell’s actions- arresting Leveller leaders, suppressing mutinies, and consolidating state power- were not simply tactical decisions but class imperatives.

Foxley acknowledges the grandees’ hostility but does not fully explore why Leveller ideas became intolerable to the propertied classes. The Levellers’ insistence on political equality clashed with the economic inequalities that underpinned the revolutionary elite’s power. Their critique of arbitrary authority threatened not only monarchical absolutism but also the authority of those who had assumed leadership of the parliamentarian cause. Their demands for legal reform challenged the very structures that maintained property relations. In short, the Levellers’ political programme was incompatible with the class interests of those who emerged victorious from the revolution.

This omission matters because it limits Foxley’s ability to explain the movement’s defeat. Without situating Leveller radicalism within the broader class structure of seventeenth‑century England, the suppression at Burford risks appearing as a contingent event rather than as the predictable outcome of a deeper social conflict. The Levellers were not defeated because their ideas were impractical or because they misjudged the political moment. They were defeated because their demands threatened the foundations of the new order the propertied classes were constructing.

Law, Liberty, and the Freeborn Englishman

The chapter on law and liberty is among the most stimulating in Foxley’s book, offering a nuanced account of Leveller legal thought and its place within the political culture of the 1640s. Yet it contains a notable omission: Foxley does not engage with Soviet legal scholarship, particularly the work of Evgeny Pashukanis, whose analysis of early modern legal forms provides one of the most sophisticated frameworks for understanding the Levellers’ juridical innovations. This absence is striking because Pashukanis’s Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law (1927) remains one of the few attempts to situate Leveller legal arguments within a broader theory of the emergence of bourgeois law. His insights illuminate precisely the terrain Foxley explores, and their omission leaves a gap in an otherwise rich chapter.

Pashukanis argued that John Lilburne’s legal thought anticipated key principles of bourgeois criminal law, including the requirement that punishment correspond to the crime and the prohibition of ex post facto legislation. These principles, which would later become foundational to modern liberal jurisprudence, appear in Lilburne’s writings not as abstract theoretical propositions but as practical demands arising from his own experiences of arbitrary imprisonment, judicial manipulation, and executive overreach. Pashukanis’s observation that Lilburne was “the first man in England to succeed in being served with an indictment” underscores the novelty of Leveller legal arguments. It highlights how Lilburne’s struggles forced the state to articulate and formalise procedures that had previously been applied inconsistently or not at all. In Pashukanis’s reading, Lilburne’s confrontations with authority reveal the embryonic formation of legal norms that would later underpin the bourgeois state.

Foxley’s silence on this tradition is regrettable, given its relevance to her subject. Her analysis rightly emphasises the Levellers’ insistence on due process, legal accountability, and the rights of the accused. She shows how their arguments drew on common law traditions, natural rights discourse, and the political language of freeborn English liberties. Yet without engaging with Pashukanis, she misses an opportunity to connect Leveller legal thought to a broader theoretical account of law’s historical development. Pashukanis’s framework would have let her situate Leveller demands within the transition from feudal to bourgeois legal forms, illuminating the structural forces that shaped their arguments and why those arguments resonated so powerfully in the 1640s.

Moreover, Pashukanis’s analysis provides a counterpoint to interpretations that treat Leveller legal thought as merely an extension of religious or constitutional traditions. By emphasising the material and class dimensions of legal development, he offers a way of understanding why the Levellers’ juridical innovations emerged when they did and why they took the form they did. His reading suggests that Leveller legal arguments were not simply moral appeals or constitutional clarifications but expressions of deeper social transformations associated with the rise of market relations, the consolidation of property rights, and the emergence of a new political subject: the legally autonomous individual. Foxley gestures toward these themes but does not fully develop them, and her omission of Pashukanis leaves this dimension of Leveller thought underexplored.

This gap is particularly evident in her discussion of the relationship between law and class. Foxley acknowledges the grandees’ hostility to Leveller legal reforms but does not analyse the structural reasons why those reforms were unacceptable to the propertied classes. Pashukanis’s framework would have clarified this point: the Levellers’ insistence on legal equality and procedural fairness challenged elites’ discretionary power. It threatened the hierarchical legal order that underpinned emerging capitalist relations. Their defeat, therefore, was not simply political but juridical: a suppression of legal forms that were incompatible with the interests of those shaping the post‑revolutionary settlement.

In sum, Foxley’s chapter on law and liberty is rich and insightful, but her omission of Pashukanis represents a missed opportunity. Engaging with Soviet legal scholarship would have deepened her analysis, connected Leveller legal thought to broader theoretical traditions, and clarified the structural forces that shaped both the movement’s achievements and its limits.

Conclusion

Foxley’s The Levellers is, without question, a major scholarly achievement. It synthesises a wide range of recent research, challenges entrenched revisionist assumptions, and restores the Levellers to a central place in the political thought of the English Revolution. In doing so, it intervenes decisively in a historiographical landscape long shaped by scepticism toward radical agency and by a tendency to minimise the intellectual coherence of seventeenth‑century popular movements. Foxley’s work demonstrates that the Levellers were not marginal pamphleteers or episodic agitators but serious political thinkers whose ideas resonated across a broad social base and contributed meaningfully to the revolutionary dynamic of the 1640s.

One of the book’s most impressive accomplishments is its ability to integrate intellectual history, political theory, and close textual analysis without losing sight of the broader revolutionary context. Foxley’s readings of Leveller pamphlets, petitions, and constitutional proposals are consistently sharp and historically grounded. She shows how the Levellers developed a distinctive political language that combined scriptural references, common-law traditions, and emerging secular reasoning. Her analysis of the Agreement of the People, in particular, highlights the movement’s constitutional imagination and its attempt to articulate a vision of political authority rooted in popular sovereignty rather than inherited privilege. In this respect, Foxley’s work significantly revises the revisionist portrayal of Leveller thought as derivative or improvisational.

Equally important is her challenge to the long‑standing assumption that Leveller influence within the New Model Army was minimal or ideologically incompatible with military discipline. By reconstructing the petitioning campaigns of 1647, the exchanges between agitators and grandees, and the connections between civilian and military radicals, Foxley demonstrates that Leveller ideas circulated widely within the army and shaped debates about representation, authority, and settlement. Her treatment of the Putney Debates is particularly effective, situating them within a broader pattern of political engagement rather than treating them as an isolated eruption of radicalism. In doing so, she restores the debates to their proper place within the revolutionary process and challenges the revisionist minimisation of rank‑and‑file political consciousness.

Despite these strengths, the book has limitations. Foxley’s reluctance to foreground class dynamics leaves an important dimension of Leveller politics underdeveloped. The movement’s social base- artisans, apprentices, small producers- shaped both the radicalism of its demands and the structural limits of its influence. The suppression of the Levellers in 1649 was not merely a political defeat but the outcome of a deeper class conflict within the revolutionary camp. While Foxley acknowledges the grandees’ hostility, she does not fully explore the material interests that made Leveller demands intolerable to the propertied classes who ultimately shaped the post‑revolutionary settlement. A more explicit engagement with class analysis would have strengthened her account of both the movement’s achievements and its defeat.

Similarly, Foxley’s silence on Soviet legal scholarship, particularly Evgeny Pashukanis, represents a missed opportunity. Pashukanis’s analysis of Lilburne’s legal thought provides a powerful theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of modern legal norms and the relationship between law and class power. Engaging with this tradition would have deepened Foxley’s discussion of Leveller jurisprudence and connected it to broader debates about the historical development of legal forms.

These limitations, however, do not diminish the book’s overall significance. The Levellers represents a major step toward a more balanced and historically grounded understanding of radical politics in the 1640s. It challenges the revisionist orthodoxy, reopens questions that had been prematurely closed, and restores the Levellers to the centre of debates about political thought in the English Revolution. It deserves a wide readership, and one hopes that a more affordable paperback edition will make it accessible to students and scholars alike.

Primary and Secondary Works

Brailsford, H. N. The Levellers and the English Revolution. London: Cresset Press, 1961.

De Krey, Gary. Review of The Levellers, by Rachel Foxley. History (online). Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1750-0206.12111_4 (onlinelibrary.wiley.com in Bing)

Foxley, Rachel. The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.

Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Preface.

Kishlansky, Mark. Various works on the New Model Army and revisionist interpretations (not directly cited with title in the essay but referenced as part of the revisionist school).

Morrill, John. Works on the English Civil War and the New Model Army (referenced in discussion of revisionist historiography).

North, David. Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism. Published online, 24 October 1996. Available at: https://www.wsws.org

Pashukanis, Evgeny B. “Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law” (1927). Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/pashukanis/1927/xx/english.htm (marxists.org in Bing)

Rees, John. – Review of The Levellers, Reviews in History, no. 1519. Available at: https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1519 (reviews.history.ac.uk in Bing) – Leveller Organisation and the Dynamic of the English Revolution. PhD thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2014. Available at: http://research.gold.ac.uk/10465/ (research.gold.ac.uk in Bing)

Slaughter, Cliff. “Religion and Social Revolt.” Labour Review, Vol. 3, No. 3 (May–June 1958), pp. 77–82.

Talbot, Ann. “‘These the times … this the man’: an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill.” World Socialist Web Site, 25 March 2003. Available at: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html (wsws.org in Bing)

Contextual and Historiographical References

Elton, G. R. Foundational works on Tudor government and the origins of revisionist historiography (referenced indirectly).

Historikerstreit. General background on the German historiographical dispute. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historikerstreit (en.wikipedia.org in Bing)

Woolrych, Austin. Works on the New Model Army and the English Civil War (referenced in discussion of revisionist interpretations).

Notes Corresponding to the Original Essay

1. Rees, John. Review of The Levellers, Reviews in History, no. 1519.
2. “Historikerstreit,” Wikipedia.
3. De Krey, Gary. Review in History.
4. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface.
5. Rees, Reviews in History, no. 1519.
6. Talbot, Ann. WSWS, 25 March 2003.
7. North, David. Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism.
8. Rees, Leveller Organisation and the Dynamic of the English Revolution, PhD thesis.
9. Foxley, The Levellers.
10. Rees, Reviews in History, no. 1519.
11. Slaughter, Cliff. “Religion and Social Revolt,” Labour Review, 1958.
12. Pashukanis, Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law (1927).

John Morrill’s highly anticipated biography, Oliver Cromwell: A Life in God’s Providence, is set for publication in 2027, marking the end of a decades-long scholarly effort. Morrill has been a prominent figure in the revisionist approach to English Civil War history for over forty years. This movement aims to depoliticise the English Revolution, downplay its class implications, and portray its key figures as religious conservatives rather than revolutionary actors. His biography claims to offer a definitive correction to what he calls “misinterpretations,” especially from the political left. However, it is essentially an act of historical apology: a work intent on reinterpreting Cromwell’s actions, casting structural violence as spiritual warfare, colonial terror as divine duty, and revolutionary chaos as devotional psychology.

The book is substantial, meticulously footnoted, and written with the scholarly confidence of a historian who has spent a lifetime immersed in seventeenth-century sources. Yet its interpretive framework is deeply ideological. Morrill’s central claim that Cromwell’s actions directly emerged from his religious worldview, and that historians have misunderstood him by failing to recognise the depth of his sincerity, is neither new, radical, nor corrective. It is the latest version of a revisionist method that substitutes piety for politics, conscience for class analysis, and psychological interiority for material causation. The result is a biography that obscures more than it reveals, ultimately helping to sanitise Cromwell’s role in the English Revolution and the colonial subjugation of Ireland.

The Revisionist Project: Religion as Historical Determinism

Morrill’s biography rests on a single interpretive engine: 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.” Morrill presents this as a methodological breakthrough, a way to recover Cromwell’s “authentic voice” from the distortions of political analysis. In reality, it is neither new nor convincing. It is a familiar device in English historiography, repeatedly used to exculpate figures whose actions cannot be defended on political, moral, or historical grounds. Invoking religious sincerity acts as a solvent, dissolving the structural and class content of Cromwell’s career into a haze of devotional interiority.

The problem is not that Cromwell was insincere. He was undoubtedly a man of intense religious conviction. But sincerity is not an explanatory category, a causal mechanism, or a historical force. Every seventeenth-century regicide, colonial adventurer, and religious persecutor believed he was doing God’s will. Sincere belief was a universal condition of the era, not a distinguishing feature of Cromwell’s career. To elevate religious sincerity into the primary explanatory framework is to substitute psychology for history, interiority for social determination, and devotional rhetoric for material analysis.

This is the hallmark of revisionism. It lets historians detach Cromwell from the revolutionary forces that shaped his career, present him as a man of conscience rather than a political actor, and transform structural violence into personal anguish. The Cromwell who emerges from this interpretive strategy is not the Cromwell of history but the Cromwell of apologetics: a man tormented by spiritual dilemmas rather than one executing the political and military imperatives of a rising bourgeois order.

Morrill’s biography is the most ambitious attempt yet to complete this transformation. He does more than foreground Cromwell’s religious language: he presents it as the force driving Cromwell’s actions. The result is a narrative in which Cromwell’s decisions whether the suppression of the Levellers, the crushing of the Diggers, the massacres at Drogheda and Wexford, or the consolidation of the Protectorate appear as tragic expressions of spiritual duty rather than deliberate acts shaped by class interests and political necessity.

This displacement has profound consequences. It renders the English Revolution unintelligible as a social process. It obscures the class dynamics that drove the conflict between Parliament and Crown, the radicalisation of the New Model Army, and the emergence of democratic currents that Cromwell ruthlessly suppressed. It transforms the colonial subjugation of Ireland into a moral drama rather than a violent assertion of English landlordism and mercantile expansion. It reduces the revolution to a series of devotional crises experienced by its leading general.

The irony is that Morrill’s own evidence undermines his interpretive framework. His biography is rich in archival detail: letters, speeches, sermons, military dispatches. These sources reveal a man deeply embedded in the political and social conflicts of his time, navigating class pressures, military realities, and ideological struggles. But Morrill refuses to read these sources historically. He reads them psychologically. He treats Cromwell’s religious language as transparent, as if it were a direct window into his motivations rather than the ideological form through which political actors expressed their aims.

The result is a biography that is empirically detailed but historically evasive. It offers a Cromwell who is always praying, always doubting, always searching for providential signs but never calculating, never strategising, never acting in defence of class interests. It is a Cromwell without politics, without social context, without historical determination.

This is not simply a methodological error. It is an ideological project. By transforming Cromwell into a man of conscience, revisionists can detach him from the revolutionary tradition and return him to a conservative national mythology. They can obscure the revolutionary destruction of feudal absolutism, the suppression of democratic movements, and the colonial violence that defined his career. They can rehabilitate Cromwell by dissolving his actions into the fog of religious sincerity. Morrill’s biography is therefore not a breakthrough but a culmination: the most polished, scholarly, and ambitious attempt yet to rescue Cromwell from history by burying him in piety.

Drogheda and Wexford: The Facts Confirm the Crime

One of the most striking features of Morrill’s biography is the tension between its empirical detail and interpretive framing. Morrill does not and cannot deny the brutality of Cromwell’s Irish campaign. The documentary record is overwhelming, and even the most conservative historians have long acknowledged the scale of the violence. At Drogheda, Cromwell’s forces killed more than 3,000 people, including clergy who were summarily executed. At Wexford, the slaughter was even more indiscriminate: civilians, soldiers, and priests alike were cut down in a frenzy of violence that contemporaries struggled to describe without invoking divine wrath. Morrill acknowledges these facts, surveys the “genocide” allegations, and concedes that Cromwell’s actions “verge on the genocidal.” In purely descriptive terms, he does not attempt to conceal the bloodshed.

But this framing turns these events into a moral puzzle rather than a political one. Morrill asks: How could a sincere Christian commit such acts? The question is misplaced. It assumes that the central issue is Cromwell’s inner lifehis conscience and spiritual torment- and that the massacre at Drogheda is best understood as a contradiction between religious devotion and military brutality. This is a false contradiction. 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. They formed part of the wider subjugation of Ireland required by English capital. The purpose was clear: to break a rival social order, clear land, destroy resistance, and reorganise Irish society under English landlordism and mercantile control. The violence at Drogheda and Wexford was not simply the product of Cromwell’s religious zeal; it was the military expression of a colonial project rooted in the material needs of a rising bourgeois order. Morrill’s own evidence confirms this, yet his Interpretive framework suppresses it.

This suppression is not accidental; it is the inevitable result of a method that treats religious sincerity as the primary explanatory category. By placing Cromwell’s spiritual anguish at the forefront, Morrill turns structural violence into personal tragedy. The massacres become moments of moral crisis rather than instruments of class power. Cromwell appears as a man torn between conscience and necessity, rather than as the executor of a colonial strategy intended to crush Irish resistance and secure English domination.

The biography’s treatment of Ireland therefore reflects its broader method. Morrill provides detailed accounts of military engagements, personal correspondence, and religious rhetoric, reconstructing Cromwell’s sermons, letters, and speeches with scholarly precision. Yet he refuses to situate these events within the structural context of English colonialism. He treats Cromwell’s religious language as transparent. However, it offers a direct window into his motivations rather than representing the ideological form through which political actors of the period expressed their aims.

The result is a narrative in which Cromwell’s actions appear as tragic expressions of religious zeal rather than deliberate instruments of class power. The colonial conquest of Ireland becomes a moral drama rather than a political project. The massacres become moments of spiritual crisis rather than acts of calculated terror designed to break resistance and secure English control. The plantation system, the confiscation of land, the destruction of Irish social structures- all of these disappear behind the veil of providential rhetoric.

This is the central flaw of Morrill’s approach. He does not misrepresent the facts; he presents them accurately. He refuses to interpret them historically. He refuses to recognise that Cromwell’s actions were shaped not by private conscience but by the structural imperatives of a bourgeois revolution that required destroying feudal absolutism at home and consolidating colonial power abroad. By dissolving these imperatives into the fog of religious sincerity, Morrill transforms Cromwell from a political actor into a spiritual pilgrim. The violence in Ireland was not a theological problem. It was a political necessity for the English ruling class. Morrill’s biography, for all its archival richness, cannot confront this reality. It therefore cannot explain Cromwell’s actions. It can only excuse them.

Cromwell’s Historical Position: Revolutionary General and Colonial Executor

A materialist analysis places Cromwell where he belongs: as the military instrument of a bourgeois revolution that overthrew feudal absolutism in England and cleared the way for capitalist property relations. The English Revolution took place in the language of religion because its participants had no other language of political legitimacy. This was true of Cromwell, the Levellers he suppressed, and the Diggers he crushed. Religion was not the revolution’s engine; it was the ideological medium through which political and class forces expressed themselves. Mistaking this ideological form for the underlying content reduces historical explanation to devotional psychology.

Cromwell’s religious worldview did not cause the revolution; it provided the ideological form through which class forces expressed themselves. His providential rhetoric, insistence on divine guidance, and constant appeals to God’s will were not transparent windows into his motivations, but discursive conventions of a society in which political legitimacy could be articulated only through theological language. Treating “religious sincerity” as an explanatory category mistakes form for content. It confuses the revolution’s ideological clothing with its material body.

Cromwell’s regime rested on three pillars: destroying feudal absolutism, consolidating parliamentary sovereignty, and suppressing democratic currents whose demands exceeded the limits of bourgeois property relations. This was the revolution’s essential achievement. The monarchy was shattered, the old feudal order broken, and the foundations for capitalist development laid. Cromwell’s military leadership was decisive in this process. He was not a mystic wandering through history; he was the general of a revolutionary army that destroyed feudalism’s political structures. The Levellers, Diggers, and radical sectaries represented the revolution’s most advanced democratic tendencies.

Their demands for expanded suffrage, communal land use, and social equality threatened the emerging bourgeois order. Cromwell suppressed them ruthlessly, not because God whispered in his ear, but because their programme conflicted with the class interests of the propertied layers that dominated Parliament and the leadership of the New Model Army.

This was also evident in the imposition of colonial terror in Ireland, where mass killing served the strategic and economic interests of English capital. The massacres at Drogheda and Wexford were not theological dilemmas but instruments of colonial domination. Their purpose was to break Irish resistance, clear land for English landlords, and reorganise Irish society under English mercantile control. Cromwell’s religious rhetoric supplied ideological justification, but the underlying motive was to consolidate English class power.

This is the Cromwell who emerges from the historical record, not the figure Morrill wishes to present. Morrill’s Cromwell is a man of conscience: a devout pilgrim navigating spiritual crises, whose political actions are the tragic outgrowth of religious sincerity. The historical Cromwell was a revolutionary general, a counterrevolutionary force, and a colonial executor. The distance between these two figures is the distance between history and apologetics.

The Polemic Against Tony Benn: A Revealing Anxiety

One of the biography’s more curious and revealing features is its polemic against Tony Benn and, by extension, the political left more broadly. Morrill argues that Benn “misunderstood” Cromwell by claiming him as part of a democratic tradition. This accusation is not incidental; it is a deliberate intervention in the long-running struggle over the meaning of the English Revolution. Morrill’s insistence that Benn distorted Cromwell’s legacy reveals the biography’s ideological purpose more clearly than any archival claim or interpretive gesture. It demonstrates that the political stakes of Cromwell’s legacy remain very much alive and that Morrill’s biography is not simply an exercise in historical scholarship, but an attempt to reshape the usable past of English nationalism.

Benn’s reading was not a distortion but an attempt to reclaim the English Revolution’s antiabsolutist content. He understood that Cromwell’s destruction of the monarchy was a progressive act, even though Cromwell later turned against the revolution’s democratic forces. Benn’s interest in Cromwell was never naïve hero-worship; it sought to place the English Revolution within a broader tradition of struggles against autocracy and for popular sovereignty. Benn recognised that Cromwell’s role cannot be reduced to religious interiority; it must be understood within the wider struggle against feudal absolutism. He saw that Cromwell’s actions, whatever their contradictions, formed part of a revolutionary process that shattered the old order and opened the way for new forms of political and social organisation.

Morrill’s anxiety is not that Benn misunderstood Cromwell. It is that Benn understood him too well. Benn’s attempt to place Cromwell within a democratic lineage threatens the revisionist project, which seeks to depoliticise the revolution and detach Cromwell from its progressive content. Benn’s interpretation insists on the political nature of Cromwell’s actions, on the class forces that shaped the revolution, and on the historical significance of the struggle against monarchy and feudalism. This is precisely what revisionists have spent decades obscuring.

The revisionist school has long sought to sever the progressive content of the English Revolution from its executor. By insisting that Cromwell’s politics were purely religious, Morrill can detach Cromwell from the revolutionary tradition and return him to a conservative national mythology: a devout man of conscience, a proto-Victorian moralist, a figure of English providential destiny. This is not scholarship. It is ideological reconstruction. It attempts to neutralise the revolutionary significance of the English Civil War and rehabilitate Cromwell by dissolving his political actions into the fog of religious sincerity.

The stakes of this reconstruction are clear. If Cromwell can be reimagined as a man driven solely by religious conviction, then the English Revolution itself can be reinterpreted as a theological drama rather than a bourgeois upheaval. The destruction of the monarchy becomes a matter of conscience rather than class struggle. The suppression of the Levellers becomes a tragic misunderstanding rather than a deliberate act of counterrevolution. The massacres in Ireland become expressions of spiritual zeal rather than instruments of colonial domination. In this narrative, Cromwell is not a revolutionary general but a moral exemplar. This figure can be safely integrated into a conservative national story about English providence and constitutional continuity.

Morrill’s polemic against Benn therefore reveals more about revisionism than about Cromwell. It exposes the biography’s ideological stakes: the desire to reclaim Cromwell for a conservative national narrative by stripping him of his revolutionary and colonial realities. Benn’s interpretation threatens this project because it insists on the political nature of Cromwell’s actions and on the revolutionary content of the English Civil War. Benn refuses to allow Cromwell to be domesticated, sanitised, or transformed into a figure of providential nationalism. He insists on seeing Cromwell as a historical actor shaped by class forces, political necessity, and revolutionary struggle.

Benn does not misunderstand Cromwell. It is Morrill. Benn’s reading recognises the contradictions of Cromwell’s career- the destruction of monarchy, the suppression of democratic movements, the imposition of colonial terror- but situates them within the broader dynamics of a bourgeois revolution. Morrill’s reading dissolves these contradictions into religious interiority and moral anguish. Benn confronts Cromwell as a political actor; Morrill retreats from politics into piety.

The polemic against Benn is therefore not a scholarly correction but an ideological manoeuvre. It seeks to reclaim Cromwell for a conservative national mythology by erasing the revolutionary and colonial realities of his career. It also works to neutralise the radical content of the English Revolution, presenting Cromwell as a figure of providential continuity rather than revolutionary rupture. In this sense, Morrill’s biography is not merely a misinterpretation of Cromwell; it is a political intervention in the ongoing struggle over the meaning of England’s revolutionary past.

Revisionism as Ideology: The Sanitisation of the English Revolution

Morrill’s biography belongs to a wider historiographical movement that includes Conrad Russell, Mark Kishlansky, and Blair Worden. This revisionist school has spent decades attempting to depoliticise the English Revolution by denying its revolutionary character, minimising class conflict, and reinterpreting political actors as religious or constitutional conservatives rather than participants in a bourgeois upheaval. Their project has been consistent: to dismantle the Marxist and social-historical interpretations that dominated mid-twentieth-century scholarship and replace them with a narrative in which the English Civil War was not a revolution at all, but a tragic misunderstanding between well-meaning constitutionalists.

The aim is clear: to strip the English Revolution of its radical content and reabsorb it into a conservative national narrative. In this narrative, the Civil War becomes a quarrel between gentlemen, the execution of Charles I becomes an unfortunate excess, and the destruction of feudal absolutism becomes a regrettable but necessary step toward the “balanced constitution” of later centuries. The revolution’s democratic currents- the Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists- are reduced to marginal irritants. The class forces that drove the conflict are dissolved into theological disputes. The colonial violence in Ireland is reframed as a tragic consequence of religious zeal rather than a deliberate instrument of English domination.

Cromwell is the central obstacle to this project. He cannot be easily domesticated. His career embodies the revolution’s contradictions: the revolutionary destruction of the old order, the suppression of democratic forces, and the imposition of colonial terror abroad. Cromwell is too large, too forceful, too historically decisive to be absorbed into the genteel constitutionalism revisionists favour. He is the figure who makes the English Revolution impossible to deny. His actions- military, political, and colonial- expose the revolution’s class content with brutal clarity.

To rehabilitate Cromwell, revisionists must transform him from a revolutionary general into a man of conscience. They must dissolve his political actions into religious interiority. They must replace the structural imperatives of bourgeois revolution with the psychological drama of spiritual struggle. Morrill’s biography is the most ambitious attempt yet to complete that transformation.

The strategy is familiar. It begins by foregrounding Cromwell’s religious language: his appeals to providence, his insistence on divine guidance, his constant references to God’s will. It then treats this language as transparent, as if it were a direct window into Cromwell’s motivations rather than the ideological medium through which seventeenth-century political actors expressed themselves. Finally, it elevates religious sincerity into the primary explanatory category, thereby displacing politics, class, and material necessity.

The result is a Cromwell who is always praying, always doubting, always searching for providential signs but never calculating, never strategising, never acting in defence of class interests. It is a Cromwell without politics, without social context, without historical determination. It is a Cromwell who can be safely integrated into a conservative national mythology: a devout man of conscience, a proto-Victorian moralist, a figure of English providential destiny.

This ideological reconstruction serves a broader purpose. If Cromwell can be reimagined as a religious conservative rather than a revolutionary general, then the English Revolution itself can be reinterpreted as a theological drama rather than a bourgeois upheaval. The destruction of the monarchy becomes a matter of conscience rather than class struggle. The suppression of the Levellers becomes a tragic misunderstanding rather than a deliberate act of counterrevolution. The massacres in Ireland become expressions of spiritual zeal rather than instruments of colonial domination.

In this narrative, the English Revolution ceases to be a revolution. It becomes a moral crisis, a constitutional adjustment, a providential trial. Its radical content disappears. Its democratic aspirations vanish. Its colonial violence is softened. Its class dynamics are erased.

Morrill’s biography is therefore not simply a reinterpretation of Cromwell. It is a political intervention in the ongoing struggle over the meaning of England’s revolutionary past. It attempts to reclaim Cromwell for a conservative national narrative by stripping him of his revolutionary and colonial realities. It seeks to neutralise the radical content of the English Civil War and present Cromwell as a figure of providential continuity rather than revolutionary rupture.

The Suppression of the Levellers and Diggers

One of the most revealing absences in Morrill’s biography is its treatment of the Levellers and Diggers. These movements represented the most democratic currents of the English Revolution, articulating demands for expanded suffrage, communal land use, and social equality. They were not marginal sects or eccentric utopians; they were the political expression of the plebeian and lower-middle-class layers whose mobilisation gave the revolution its mass character. The Levellers articulated a coherent programme of political democracy- annual Parliaments, near-universal male suffrage, equality before the law- while the Diggers attempted to realise the revolution’s social promise through communal cultivation of common land. Together, they represented the revolution’s most advanced aspirations.

Cromwell suppressed them ruthlessly. The Putney Debates, often romanticised as a moment of proto-democratic deliberation, were in fact the prelude to repression. Cromwell and Henry Ireton made clear that political power would remain tied to property. When Leveller agitation continued, Cromwell responded with force: imprisoning leaders such as Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn; crushing mutinies in the New Model Army; and sending troops to break up Digger communities at St George’s Hill and elsewhere. These were not peripheral episodes. They were central to the revolution’s trajectory, marking the moment when the bourgeois forces that had shattered the monarchy turned decisively against the democratic movements that threatened their newly consolidated power.

Morrill acknowledges these events, but only in the most superficial terms. He refuses to interpret them as expressions of class conflict. Instead, he presents them as tragic misunderstandings, the result of Cromwell’s “inflexible conscience” and “fear of disorder.” This is a profound distortion. Suppressing democratic movements was not a matter of conscience. It was a matter of class power. The Levellers and Diggers threatened the emerging bourgeois order. Cromwell acted to defend that order.

By refusing to recognise this, Morrill transforms counterrevolution into moral struggle. The suppression of the Levellers becomes a sad but necessary act of a man torn between principle and pragmatism. The destruction of the Diggers becomes a lamentable consequence of Cromwell’s “concern for stability.” The mutinies in the New Model Army become unfortunate eruptions of “misguided zeal.” In Morrill’s narrative, Cromwell is always a man wrestling with conscience, never a political actor enforcing class discipline.

This interpretive strategy is not accidental. It is essential to the revisionist project. If the Levellers and Diggers are acknowledged as democratic movements crushed by a bourgeois revolutionary leadership, then the English Revolution must be recognised as a class struggle. If Cromwell’s suppression of these movements is understood as counterrevolution, then Cromwell cannot be rehabilitated as a figure of providential virtue. He becomes what the historical record shows him to be: the military instrument of a rising bourgeois order, willing to use force against both feudal absolutism and plebeian democracy.

Morrill’s silence on the class content of these conflicts speaks volumes. It reveals the ideological stakes of his biography. To preserve Cromwell as a man of conscience, the democratic movements he suppressed must be depoliticised. Their demands must be rendered naïve, their leaders misguided, their actions destabilising. The class antagonism that defined the revolution must be dissolved into a moral drama. The Levellers and Diggers must be stripped of their historical significance so that Cromwell can be stripped of his political responsibility.

This is not scholarship. It is ideological reconstruction. It attempts to rewrite the English Revolution as a theological crisis rather than a bourgeois upheaval. It seeks to transform Cromwell from a revolutionary general into a moral exemplar. It refuses to confront the revolution’s contradictions: the same forces that destroyed the monarchy also crushed the revolution’s most democratic aspirations.

Morrill’s treatment of the Levellers and Diggers therefore reveals the limits of his entire project. A biography that cannot confront the class dynamics of the English Revolution cannot explain Cromwell’s actions. It can only excuse them. By dissolving counterrevolution into conscience, Morrill obscures the period’s political realities and turns history into moral theatre. The result is a Cromwell who never existed: a man without politics, class interests, or responsibility for suppressing democratic movements.

The Protectorate: Bourgeois Order in Religious Form

Morrill’s treatment of the Protectorate is similarly distorted. He presents Cromwell’s regime as an attempt to create a “godly commonwealth,” a political experiment driven by religious ideals and animated by a sincere desire to reform the nation’s moral life. In Morrill’s narrative, the Protectorate becomes the culmination of Cromwell’s spiritual journey: a providentially guided effort to build a society worthy of divine favour. But this framing is not merely inadequate; it is fundamentally misleading. It turns a bourgeois dictatorship into a theological project, replacing the material realities of class power with the devotional rhetoric that justified it.

The Protectorate was, in essence, a bourgeois dictatorship. It consolidated property relations, suppressed radical movements, expanded colonial power, and stabilised the social order the revolution had created. It was the political form through which the victorious bourgeoisie secured its gains after destroying feudal absolutism. The religious language of the regime- its talk of godliness, reformation, providence- was the ideological form of bourgeois rule. Morrill mistakes this form for content. He treats Cromwell’s religious rhetoric as transparent, as if it were a direct window into his motivations rather than the ideological medium through which seventeenth-century political actors expressed themselves.

The result is a narrative in which Cromwell appears as a visionary reformer rather than the executor of class power. Morrill’s Cromwell is a man striving to build a moral commonwealth, wrestling with conscience, seeking divine guidance. The historical Cromwell was a political actor who enforced class discipline, suppressed democratic movements, and consolidated the gains of a bourgeois revolution. The gap between these two figures is the gap between history and apologetics.

The Protectorate’s policies make its class character unmistakable. It upheld the primacy of property, restricted political participation to propertied men, and crushed any movement that threatened the new order’s stability. The Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists, and other radical sectaries were suppressed not because Cromwell feared “disorder,” as Morrill claims, but because their demands exceeded the limits of bourgeois property relations. The Protectorate’s religious rhetoric- its calls for moral reform, its denunciations of ungodliness- served to mask these class imperatives. It provided a moral vocabulary through which the regime could justify its actions, but it did not determine those actions.

Morrill’s refusal to recognise this leads him to misinterpret the Protectorate’s most significant features. He treats the Major Generals as moral overseers rather than instruments of military rule. He interprets the regime’s censorship and surveillance as efforts to promote godliness rather than mechanisms of political control. He presents Cromwell’s dissolution of Parliaments as expressions of spiritual frustration rather than acts of authoritarian consolidation. In Morrill’s narrative, the Protectorate becomes a moral experiment gone awry, a noble attempt to reform the nation undermined by human frailty and political miscalculation.

This is a profound distortion. The Protectorate was not a failed utopia. It successfully consolidated bourgeois power. Its authoritarian features were not deviations from its religious ideals; they expressed its class character. The regime’s stability depended on suppressing democratic movements, controlling political expression, and maintaining military discipline. Its religious rhetoric provided ideological cover, but the ruling class’s material needs drove its actions.

By dissolving these realities into the fog of religious sincerity, Morrill transforms the Protectorate into a moral drama rather than a political project. He obscures the class dynamics that shaped the regime and replaces them with psychological speculation about Cromwell’s conscience. The result is a biography that cannot explain the Protectorate. It can only excuse it.

Morrill’s treatment of the Protectorate therefore reveals the limits of his entire interpretive framework. A biography that cannot confront the class character of Cromwell’s regime cannot explain Cromwell’s actions. It can only transform them into expressions of spiritual struggle. The Protectorate becomes a theological experiment rather than a bourgeois dictatorship. Cromwell becomes a visionary reformer rather than the executor of class power. History becomes a morality play. Morrill does not misunderstand the Protectorate. It is Cromwell and the revolution he led.

The Biography’s Method: Archival Detail Without Historical Explanation

Morrill’s biography is rich in archival detail. It provides extensive quotations from Cromwell’s letters, speeches, and religious meditations. It reconstructs military campaigns with precision, often with admirable command of the sources. It offers nuanced accounts of Cromwell’s personal relationships, his spiritual crises, and the devotional language through which he interpreted the world. As empirical scholarship, Morrill’s work is formidable. But empirical richness is not the same as historical explanation. The biography’s interpretive framework is so narrow, so psychologically and theologically fixated, that it cannot make sense of the very evidence it assembles. It refuses to situate Cromwell’s actions within the structural context of the English Revolution, the rise of bourgeois property relations, and the expansion of English colonialism. The result is a narrative that is detailed but fundamentally evasive.

This is the revisionist method’s fundamental flaw. It treats political actors as isolated individuals rather than as expressions of social forces. It replaces class analysis with psychological interpretation. It transforms revolution into biography. Morrill’s Cromwell is a man of conscience, a spiritual pilgrim navigating crises of faith, a figure whose political actions are the tragic outgrowth of religious sincerity. The historical Cromwell was a political actor shaped by class forces, military necessity, and the structural imperatives of a bourgeois revolution. Morrill’s refusal to recognise this produces a Cromwell who is always praying, always doubting, always searching for providential signs but never calculating, never strategising, never acting in defence of class interests.

The biography’s structure reinforces this distortion. Morrill moves from letter to letter, sermon to sermon, meditation to meditation, treating each as a transparent window into Cromwell’s inner life. But seventeenth-century religious language was not transparent. It was the ideological medium through which political actors expressed themselves. Cromwell’s appeals to providence were not spontaneous eruptions of conscience; they were the discursive conventions of a society in which political legitimacy could only be articulated through theological vocabulary. Morrill mistakes this ideological form for content. He treats Cromwell’s religious rhetoric as the cause of his actions rather than the language that justified them.

This leads to a series of interpretive failures. Cromwell’s suppression of the Levellers becomes a tragic misunderstanding rather than a deliberate act of counterrevolution. His destruction of the Diggers becomes an expression of “fear of disorder” rather than a defence of bourgeois property relations. His massacres in Ireland become moments of spiritual crisis rather than instruments of colonial domination. His authoritarian rule as Lord Protector becomes a moral experiment rather than the consolidation of class power. In each case, Morrill dissolves political action into psychological drama.

The biography’s refusal to confront the structural context of Cromwell’s career is most evident in its treatment of the English Revolution itself. Morrill describes battles, debates, and political manoeuvres, but he never explains why they occurred. The conflict between Parliament and Crown is reduced to constitutional misunderstanding. The radicalisation of the New Model Army becomes a matter of religious enthusiasm. The emergence of democratic movements becomes a problem of “ungovernable zeal.” The destruction of the monarchy becomes a tragic necessity rather than a revolutionary act. The revolution’s class dynamics- its destruction of feudal absolutism, its consolidation of bourgeois property relations, its suppression of plebeian democracy- are almost absent.

This absence is not accidental. It is the inevitable consequence of a method that refuses to recognise class as a historical force. Morrill’s Cromwell is shaped not by the pressures of a rising bourgeois order, but by conscience. He is not the executor of colonial policy; he is a man struggling with providence. He is not the suppressor of democratic movements; he is a leader burdened by moral responsibility. By dissolving politics into piety, Morrill transforms the English Revolution into a theological drama and Cromwell into its tormented protagonist.

The result is a biography that is empirically rich but historically impoverished. It offers detail without explanation, narrative without analysis, and psychology without politics. It cannot explain Cromwell’s actions because it refuses to recognise the forces that shaped them. Cromwell is not misunderstood. The revolution is not misunderstood; Morrill is.

 A Genuine Reckoning

A genuine reckoning with Cromwell requires exactly what Morrill’s biography sets out to discredit: a materialist analysis of the English Revolution, its class forces, its ideological forms, and its colonial consequences. It requires an understanding of Cromwell not as a saint of providence but as a political actor whose actions were shaped by the needs of a rising bourgeois order. The revolution was not a theological drama. It was a social upheaval that destroyed feudal absolutism, consolidated capitalist property relations, and expanded English colonial power. Cromwell’s religious language was the ideological medium through which these forces expressed themselves, not the engine that drove them.

To confront Cromwell historically is to recognise the contradictions of his career: that the same general who shattered the monarchy also suppressed the revolution’s most democratic currents; that the same leader who spoke of liberty and godliness imposed military rule and crushed plebeian movements; that the same man who invoked divine providence presided over massacres in Ireland that served the strategic interests of English capital. These contradictions cannot be dissolved into conscience. They must be explained through class analysis.

The left did not misunderstand Cromwell. Those who wish to rescue him from history have misunderstood him. The left’s interpretation, whether expressed by Christopher Hill, Brian Manning, or Tony Benn, has always insisted on the political nature of Cromwell’s actions. It has recognised that Cromwell was neither a protodemocrat nor a protofascist, but the military instrument of a bourgeois revolution shaped by class forces and material necessity. The left has understood that Cromwell’s religious language was the ideological form of political action, not its cause. It has understood that the revolution’s democratic movements were suppressed not because Cromwell feared “disorder,” but because their demands exceeded the limits of bourgeois property relations.

Morrill’s biography does not correct past distortions. It is the latest attempt to obscure the revolutionary and colonial realities of Cromwell’s career behind the veil of religious sincerity. It is an exercise in historical apologetics, dressed in the language of scholarly revision. Morrill’s Cromwell is a man of conscience, a spiritual pilgrim navigating crises of faith, a figure whose political actions are the tragic outgrowth of religious devotion. The historical Cromwell was a political actor shaped by class forces, military necessity, and the structural imperatives of a bourgeois revolution. Morrill’s refusal to recognise this produces a Cromwell who never existed.

This ideological reconstruction serves a broader purpose. If Cromwell can be reimagined as a religious conservative rather than a revolutionary general, then the English Revolution itself can be reinterpreted as a theological drama rather than a bourgeois upheaval. The destruction of the monarchy becomes a matter of conscience rather than class struggle. The suppression of the Levellers becomes a tragic misunderstanding rather than a deliberate act of counterrevolution. The massacres in Ireland become expressions of spiritual zeal rather than instruments of colonial domination. In this narrative, the English Revolution ceases to be a revolution. It becomes a moral crisis, a constitutional adjustment, a providential trial.

Morrill’s biography therefore reveals the ideological stakes of revisionism. It is not simply a reinterpretation of Cromwell; it is a political intervention in the ongoing struggle over the meaning of England’s revolutionary past. It is an attempt to reclaim Cromwell for a conservative national mythology by stripping him of his revolutionary and colonial realities. It seeks to neutralise the radical content of the English Civil War and present Cromwell as a figure of providential continuity rather than revolutionary rupture.

A genuine reckoning with Cromwell must reject this apologetic framework. It must confront the revolution’s class dynamics, democratic aspirations, colonial violence, and ideological forms. It must recognise Cromwell as a historical actor shaped by social forces, not as a moral exemplar guided by divine providence. Only then can the English Revolution be understood in all its complexity and Cromwell in all his contradictions.

Primary Sources

• Cromwell, Oliver. Letters and Speeches. The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell Volume 1: October 1626 to January 1649. Edited by Andrew Barclay, Tim Wales, and John Morrill. General editor: John Morrill
• Classic collections of Cromwell’s correspondence and public addresses, often edited by Thomas Carlyle and later scholars. These provide insight into Cromwell’s religious language, military decisions, and political rhetoric.
• The Clarke Papers (ed. C.H. Firth). Transcriptions of debates and discussions within the New Model Army, including the Putney Debates. Essential for understanding the conflict between Cromwell, Ireton, and the Leveller representatives.
• The Thomason Tracts. A vast archive of pamphlets, sermons, and political writings from the 1640s–1650s, documenting the ideological struggles of the English Revolution.
• John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn – Leveller Pamphlets. Political writings advocating expanded suffrage, legal equality, and popular sovereignty. These texts reveal the democratic currents Cromwell suppressed.
• Gerrard Winstanley – The Law of Freedom and Digger writings. Radical proposals for communal land use and social equality, illustrating the revolutionary aspirations crushed by Cromwell’s regime.

Secondary Sources: Marxist and Social-Historical Interpretations

• Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down; God’s Englishman; The English Revolution 1640. Foundational Marxist analyses of the English Revolution, emphasising class struggle, ideological forms, and Cromwell’s revolutionary/counterrevolutionary role.
• Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution; The Far Left in the English Revolution. Detailed studies of plebeian radicalism, Leveller and Digger movements, and the social forces driving the revolution.
• Morton, A.L. A People’s History of England. A classic Marxist overview situating Cromwell within the broader development of English capitalism.
• Reid, John. The Radical Left in the English Civil War. Analysis of democratic and egalitarian movements suppressed by Cromwell and the Army grandees.

Secondary Sources: Revisionist Historiography

• Morrill, John. Oliver Cromwell: A Life in God’s Providence (forthcoming, 2028). The subject of the review. Morrill’s biography emphasises Cromwell’s religious sincerity and downplays the revolution’s class dynamics.
• Russell, Conrad. The Causes of the English Civil War. A key revisionist text arguing that the conflict was constitutional rather than revolutionary, minimising class forces.
• Kishlansky, Mark. A Monarchy Transformed; The Rise of the New Model Army. Works that reinterpret the revolution as a political crisis rather than a social upheaval, often downplaying radical movements.
• Worden, Blair. The English Civil Wars; God’s Instruments. Revisionist analyses emphasising religious motivation and constitutionalism over class struggle.
• Woolrych, Austin. Britain in Revolution. A major narrative history aligned with revisionist tendencies, though more balanced than Russell or Kishlansky.

Secondary Sources: Colonialism and Ireland

• Lenihan, Pádraig. Consolidating Conquest: Ireland 1600–1700. A detailed study of English colonial policy in Ireland, including Cromwell’s campaign.
• Ó Siochrú, Micheál. God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland. A modern account emphasising the brutality and political purpose of Cromwell’s Irish campaign.
• Canny, Nicholas. Making Ireland British. A broader analysis of English colonialism, situating Cromwell’s actions within long-term imperial strategy.

Secondary Sources: Ideology, Religion, and Revolution

• Walzer, Michael. Revolution of the Saints. A study of Puritan political ideology, useful for understanding the revolution’s religious language.
• Pocock, J.G.A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. A classic work on the ideological frameworks of seventeenth-century political thought.
• Sharpe, Kevin. The Personal Rule of Charles I. Contextualises the absolutist system Cromwell helped destroy.

Works on Historiography and Method

• Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution. A Marxist methodological guide to interpreting the English Revolution as a class struggle.
• Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. While focused on a later period, Thompson’s method of recovering “history from below” informs the analysis of Levellers and Diggers.
• Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution. A broader framework for understanding bourgeois revolutions and their ideological forms.

Additional Contextual Works

• Benn, Tony. Arguments for Democracy; The Levellers and the English Democratic Tradition. Benn’s political writings situate Cromwell within a democratic lineage, precisely the interpretation Morrill seeks to discredit.
• Rees, John. The Leveller Revolution. A modern social-historical study of Leveller politics and their suppression.

Ronald Hutton’s The Making of Oliver Cromwell is the first part of a trilogy that explores a field already crowded with studies of the man who led England’s seventeenth-century bourgeois revolution. Hutton acknowledges this saturation. Since 1990, five detailed academic biographies and many popular accounts have been published. Notably, an experienced historian feels compelled, in the opening pages, to defend the need for yet another biography of Cromwell. This is not because of Cromwell’s endless complexity, but because traditional historiography has already explored the revolutionary aspects of the English Revolution extensively and offers limited new insights.

Hutton has produced a book that is technically accomplished, exhaustively researched in the secondary literature, and almost entirely without insight into why Cromwell mattered. This is the core of the issue. Hutton’s Cromwell is a figure stripped of historical necessity, severed from the class forces that produced him, and rendered intelligible only as a psychological curiosity or a military technician. The result is a biography that is not merely incomplete but fundamentally evasive a retreat from historical truth.

The Wrong Historian for the Right Subject

Hutton is a prolific historian of early modern England, but not one whose work has ever seriously engaged the political, social, or class dynamics of the 1640s. His reputation rests on studies of the Royalist war effort, the ritual year, paganism, and witchcraft subjects interesting in themselves, but far removed from the structural forces that produced Cromwell. This distance is not incidental. It shapes the book’s entire method.

Hutton views Cromwell primarily through his personal traits, psychology, and military skills. He sidesteps aspects like class, ideology, or social change, and is not familiar with revolutionary historiography. Consequently, he creates a biography of Cromwell that effectively depicts someone else- someone who never led a revolution, faced dual power struggles, or managed the tensions between a bourgeois leadership and a plebeian army. This isn’t just about emphasising different details; it’s a fundamentally different approach. Hutton’s portrayal of Cromwell doesn’t reflect who he truly was.

A Military Biography Disguised as a Study of Formation

The title suggests a focus on developing a revolutionary leader. However, as your document highlights, Hutton’s account is mainly a military narrative that traces Cromwell’s progression from an obscure Huntingdonshire gentleman to England’s most formidable cavalry commander. The issue isn’t the legitimacy of military history itself, but Hutton’s portrayal of Cromwell’s rise; he presents it more as a psychological phenomenon than a political development.

He consistently downplays Cromwell’s accomplishments, attributing them to luck, while claiming he takes credit for success. Describing Cromwell as “about 50 per cent saint and about 50 per cent serpent’ sounds insightful but offers no real explanation. These characterisations simplify Cromwell’s complex nature, treating his contradictions as personal flaws rather than recognising their roots in his role as a bourgeois revolutionary leader reliant on a plebeian army he did not entirely trust.

The key question of how a man with no military background became the greatest general of his time is raised but not answered. Hutton admits that war radicalised Cromwell, but he fails to clarify how or why. The explanation is absent because the categories required to understand it class, ideology, dual power have been deliberately omitted beforehand.

The exclusion of Christopher Hill’s ‘God’s Englishman’ is surprising. Hill’s insights into Cromwell’s political and religious evolution are unparalleled, yet Hutton omits reference to it. This isn’t just a scholarly oversight but a deliberate methodological choice. Hill’s work defies integration into a framework that dismisses the revolution’s social dimensions.

The Levellers: The Omission That Condemns the Book

Hutton’s book notably omits the Levellers, leaving it incomplete and evasive. By ignoring this key element, it sidesteps the core conflict of the revolution’s final phase: the internal clash within Parliament between the Independent aristocrats and the common soldiers of the New Model Army. As one might say, “A book on Cromwell’s creation that leaves out the Levellers effectively chooses not to address the revolution’s central drama.”

The Levellers were more than a fringe group; they expressed the political perspective of a faction within the army. Their demands, such as expanded voting rights, legal equality, and religious toleration, signified the most radical revolutionary stance. Overlooking them equates to dismissing the revolution itself. The Diggers are also often misunderstood. Hutton characterises them as a “junto,” relying on John Adamson’s elite-faction viewpoint. This is not genuine analysis; it displaces social conflict with elite strategies. Additionally, it ignores the interests of yeomen, small producers, and urban artisans, whom the New Model Army aimed to represent. This is a significant flaw, not a minor oversight.

Dual Power: The Category Revisionism Cannot Admit

To understand Cromwell is to understand dual power, the concept English revisionists have spent forty years trying to write out of the story. Trotsky’s analysis, drawn from the Russian Revolution but explicitly applied to the English case, remains the most penetrating account of the revolution’s structure.

The first duality involves the Crown versus a bourgeois Parliament supported by the City of London. The second, more distinct duality, is between the Presbyterian Parliament and the Independents-led New Model Army, organised through its own council of agitators. This second duality underpins Pride’s Purge, the King’s trial, and the subsequent dictatorship. Cromwell’s skill was in navigating this complex power structure: he suppressed the Levellers when their demands threatened his settlement, yet relied on their popular energy to defeat the King and Presbyterians. Without recognising this duality, a biography cannot fully explain Cromwell; it can only describe him.

Revisionism as Ideology

Hutton’s omissions are deliberate, rooted in a revisionist historiography that gained popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. This perspective sought to challenge both the Whig and Marxist traditions by replacing social explanations with concepts of contingency, replacing class conflict with factional politics, and viewing revolutions as accidents. This focus on contingency, faction, and high politics largely strips away class content. As a product of this school, Hutton’s book confidently omits references to Hill, Manning, or Trotsky, not as a scholarly oversight but as a deliberate choice. Revisionism isn’t neutral; it’s ideological. It aims to depict the English Revolution as a mere civil war lacking social roots, a conflict without class struggle, and a crisis with no revolutionary potential. This perspective shapes how students and readers view history as a series of accidents rather than an arena of conflict.

In opposition to Hutton’s psychological reductionism, Plekhanov’s classic analysis of individuals in history provides the essential correction. Great figures are not mere accidents but arise from social conditions that demand someone to fulfil a specific historical role. Had Cromwell not existed, another individual from the same social strata- people from the godly, property-owning gentry with sectarian ties- would have stepped into a similar role. The revolution would still have needed to address the fundamental issue. Hutton misses this because he excludes the categories that would make this understanding clear.

Hutton’s narrative is well-crafted, demonstrating a strong command of detail and a competent reconstruction of battles and campaigns. It provides a clear, chronological military account for those interested. However, as an explanation of how an obscure man became the central figure in the first significant bourgeois revolution in European history, the book falls short. It does so by dismissing essential categories such as class, dual power, and ideological radicalisation needed to answer that question. There are two volumes left. Based on this one, there is little reason to expect a departure from the conservative historiographical stance that has spent decades separating Cromwell from the revolution that shaped him.

The issue extends beyond academia; it is inherently political. Depoliticising Cromwell equates to depoliticising the revolution, which in turn leads to a dehistorized view of history. This stance leaves a population unable to identify the driving forces behind their world. Hutton’s book is more than a flawed biography; it reflects a wider ideological retreat that shuns historical truth, class analysis, and the revolutionary tradition essential to understanding the modern world.

The English Revolution was the first great bourgeois revolution. It produced the modern state. It produced the conditions for capitalist development. It produced the political vocabulary of rights, representation, and sovereignty. And it produced, in the Levellers and Diggers, the first modern expressions of radical democracy and agrarian communism. To write Cromwell without this context is to write Cromwell out of history.

A Biography Without a Revolution

Hutton’s The Making of Oliver Cromwell offers a well-crafted military and political account. However, it does not serve as a biography of Cromwell as a revolutionary leader. Instead, it portrays Cromwell as a figure shaped by accidents, contingencies, and personal contradictions, seemingly detached from the social forces that influenced him. Hutton’s work “fails, because it has ruled out in advance the categories of analysis: class, dual power, the social content of religious radicalism, without which that question cannot be answered.” This statement is true and definitive. Ultimately, Hutton’s biography omits the revolution, and without a revolution, it cannot fully explain the man who led one.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary and Contemporary Sources

• The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. (Essential for Cromwell’s own political and religious vocabulary; widely used across Cromwell scholarship.)
• The Discovery of D’Ewes’s Long Parliament Diary. (Key contemporary parliamentary source.)

Classic Biographies and Foundational Works

• Gardiner, S.R. Cromwell’s Place in History (1897).
• Gardiner, S.R. Oliver Cromwell (1901).
• Firth, C.H. Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans (1900). (Still indispensable for narrative structure and early scholarly framing.)

Mid‑20th‑Century Studies

• Buchan, J. Oliver Cromwell (1934).
• Wedgwood, C.V. Oliver Cromwell (1939).
• Paul, R.S. The Lord Protector (1955).
• Young, P. Oliver Cromwell (1962).
• Gillingham, J. Cromwell: Portrait of a Soldier (1976). (These works shaped the pre‑revisionist consensus and remain valuable for narrative and military analysis.)

Marxist and Social-Historical Scholarship

• Hill, Christopher. God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1970). (The most important Marxist study of Cromwell’s political and religious development; conspicuously absent from Hutton’s book.)
• Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down (1972). (Definitive account of radical sects, Levellers, Diggers, and plebeian politics.)
• Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution (1976).
• Manning, Brian. The Far Left in the English Revolution (1971).
• Morton, A.L. The English Revolution (1949).
• Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution (1932), esp. Vol. 1, ch. on dual power. (Trotsky’s analysis is explicitly applicable to the English case and central to your review’s argument.)
• Plekhanov, Georgi. The Role of the Individual in History (1898). (Essential theoretical counterpoint to Hutton’s psychological reductionism.)

Revisionist Historiography (1970s–1990s)

• Russell, Conrad. The Causes of the English Civil War (1990).
• Russell, Conrad. Parliamentary History and the English Civil War (1983).
• Sharpe, Kevin. The Personal Rule of Charles I (1992).
• Adamson, John. The Noble Revolt (2007). (Adamson’s “junto” framework is directly relevant to Hutton’s interpretive choices.)
• Kishlansky, Mark. A Monarchy Transformed (1996). (Revisionist synthesis influential in curriculum debates.)

Post‑Revisionist and Recent Scholarship

• Morrill, John (ed.). Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1990). (Includes major essays by Adamson, Woolrych, Stevenson, Davis, Sommerville, and Morrill himself.)
• Gaunt, Peter. Oliver Cromwell (1996).
• Coward, Barry. Oliver Cromwell (1991).
• Smith, D.L. Oliver Cromwell: Politics and Religion in the English Revolution (1991). (Useful for students; reproduces extracts from other historians.)
• Gaunt, Peter (ed.). Cromwell 400 (1999). (Quartercentenary collection of papers.)

Works on Radical Movements

• Wolfe, Don. Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (1944).
• Rees, John. The Leveller Revolution (2016).
• Sabine, John. The Diggers and the English Revolution (1975).
• Hill, Christopher. The Diggers (1975).
• Foxley, Rachel. The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (2013).

General Histories of the English Revolution

• Woolrych, Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (2002).
• Hutton, Ronald. The British Republic 1649–1660 (2000).
• Gentles, Ian. The New Model Army (1992).
• Elliott, J.H. Revolution and Continuity in Early Modern Europe (1978).

Biographical and Encyclopaedic Sources

• Morrill, John S. “Oliver Cromwell.” Encyclopaedia Britannica (2026). (Provides a mainstream biographical overview.)
• Collins, Jacquelin. “Oliver Cromwell.” EBSCO Research Starters (2024). (Useful for contemporary summaries of Cromwell’s political and military significance.)

Curriculum, Ideology, and Historiography

• Carr, E.H. What Is History? (1961). (Foundational for the argument that one must “study the historian before the facts.”)
• Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory (1994). (On the politics of historical memory and curriculum.)
• Ferguson, Niall. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003). (Relevant to the review’s discussion of conservative rehabilitation of imperial figures.)

The historian and writer John Rees recently dismissed my work as “moronic,” a comment delivered with an arrogance that wrongly equates theatrical confidence with intellectual depth. A clear factual point triggered his outburst: the article he criticised directly and thoroughly addresses capitalist structural issues. This is not a matter of interpretation or emphasis; it is simply a fact. Rees’s criticism therefore rested on a false premise. Once an argument’s foundation is false, everything built on it collapses. In that sense, his intervention was, in his own words, moronic.

However, the problem goes beyond a single careless insult. Rees’s reaction shows a common pattern: when faced with evidence that challenges his favoured story, he replaces careful analysis with assertion and dismisses with ridicule. His confident tone aims to hide the fact that he hasn’t truly engaged with the argument’s core. It’s simpler to sneer than to admit that his critique distorts the text he alleges to analyse.

This isn’t just a lapse in academic thoroughness; it’s a strategic political move. By asserting that his work does not  “ignore structure,” he constructs a convenient falsehood to portray himself as the champion of methodological rigour. However, when the evidence clearly shows that structural analysis is explicit, central, and unavoidable, his claim becomes not only inaccurate but also deliberately misleading.

What made the episode even more revealing was the venue of his “intervention.” His grand theoretical denunciation appeared not in a journal, not in a serious forum, but on that well‑known academic platform called Twitter, a medium perfectly suited to the drive‑by insult, the evasive half‑thought, and the refusal to engage with evidence. His comment was not only dismissive; it was unfounded, inaccurate, and demonstrably incorrect. The entire exchange exposed the intellectual poverty of his position: a loud assertion masking the absence of argument, a confident tone concealing a factual vacuum.

Rees’s insult therefore tells us far more about his method than about my work. It reveals a pattern: when confronted with structural analysis that contradicts his voluntarist worldview, he resorts to caricature rather than engagement, dismissal rather than debate. His Twitter broadside was not a critique but a symptom, a small, noisy expression of the larger falsification that underpins his books.

This exchange is more than just a minor academic disagreement. It exposes a fundamental flaw in Rees’s Marxism and his interpretation of the English Revolution: his work rests on a core falsification that distorts all subsequent arguments. Rees claims that Marxist historians supposedly “ignored structural questions,” positioning himself as the heroic figure restoring a supposedly lost methodological approach. However, this assertion is not only incorrect but also historically unjustifiable. It demands that readers overlook the entire Marxist tradition, from Hill and Manning to Dobb, Hilton, Morton, and the broader scholarship on the seventeenth-century crisis.

Rees needs this lie because, without it, his work lacks purpose. If he admitted that Marxists have always been structural historians, his work would appear derivative: a competent summary of Hill and Manning, filled with recycled insights and falsely presented as innovative methodology. Therefore, the lie is politically essential. It enables Rees to portray familiar ideas as discoveries, to elevate himself above the tradition he’s summarising, and to assert a level of theoretical authority he hasn’t genuinely earned.

Rees and the Base–Superstructure Problem

A key weakness in John Rees’s historical approach is his treatment of the Marxist idea of the base and superstructure. While he often uses Marxist terms, his interpretive practice frequently reverses the relationship Marx and Engels outline. This leads to a form of “political Marxism” in which ideology, discourse, and organisational structures take precedence, and the foundational elements of revolutionary change are seen as less important or optional. This reversal is more than a theoretical mistake; it directly affects how Rees views the English Revolution and the Leveller movement.

Marx describes the base- the combined productive forces and relations of production- as the fundamental ‘real foundation’ that gives rise to political and ideological structures. The superstructure includes the state, law, religion, philosophy, and the broader ideological sphere, which stabilise and legitimise class relations. The relationship between base and superstructure is dialectical: the base ultimately influences the superstructure, but the superstructure also feeds back to influence the base, guiding and sometimes hindering its evolution. Understanding this relationship is crucial for explaining why revolutions happen, how class groups form, and why political actors may be unaware of the structural forces shaping their actions.

Rees’s analysis, however, focuses more on the superstructure and often overlooks the foundational economic aspects. In The Leveller Revolution, the story centres on political action, ideological disputes, and organisational innovation. Pamphlets, debates, and factional strategies take prominence. At the same time, the significant structural changes in seventeenth-century England, such as agrarian capitalism, the collapse of feudal property systems, the rise of merchant capitalism, and England’s integration into the emerging global system, are only briefly addressed. The Levellers are portrayed not as products of class conflicts but as independent political agents whose ideas drive historical change. This approach exemplifies the kind of idealism Marx criticised in his critiques of the Young Hegelians.

The issue becomes sharper when Rees places it within the wider scope of the English Revolution. Marxist historiography has traditionally argued that national revolutions should be understood in the context of the seventeenth-century global crisis, including the Dutch revolt, Spanish fiscal collapse, French state failure, and Ottoman stagnation. These were interconnected events reflecting a world-system in deep change. Rees’s hesitation to consider this structural framework narrows his analysis to England’s internal political conflicts, disconnecting the revolution from the global forces that influenced it. A Marxist critique that overlooks the world-system is, at best, incomplete; at worst, it risks replicating the national insularity of the revisionist historiography he opposes.

This narrowing has methodological consequences. When the base is minimised, the superstructure becomes inflated. Ideology appears autonomous; political actors seem to generate history through discourse alone. The Levellers become a free‑floating democratic project rather than a political expression of the contradictions of early bourgeois society. The crisis of the Stuart state becomes a matter of constitutional conflict rather than the political form of deeper economic and social tensions. In short, Rees’s approach risks transforming Marxism into a theory of political voluntarism.

A genuinely Marxist analysis of the English Revolution would begin with the structural conditions: the transformation of agrarian capitalism, the pressures of market expansion, the contradictions of feudal property relations, and the fiscal‑military crisis of the early modern state. Only then would it move to the political and ideological forms through which these contradictions were expressed. Rees reverses this order. He begins with ideology and political action, and only occasionally gestures toward the structural forces that Marxists consider primary.

In this sense, Rees’s treatment of base and superstructure is not merely theoretically inadequate; it undermines the very Marxist method he claims to defend. By privileging the superstructure, he produces a historiography that is Marxist in vocabulary but not in substance: a political reading of a profoundly structural revolution.

Rees’s philosophical outlook is heavily influenced by the political culture of the organisation he once belonged to. The SWP has long promoted a story where it alone maintains the true revolutionary tradition against revisionists, academics, and apostates. Each intervention is framed as a rescue: Marxism is constantly in crisis, under threat, and in need of restoration, with the SWP positioned as the saviour. Rees’s book exemplifies this pattern. It states there is a crisis (“Marxists ignored structure”), then offers itself as the remedy (“I will restore the method”). This deception is intentional and embedded in Rees’s book.

There is also a deeper methodological tension. Rees’s own historiographical instincts lean toward voluntarism, political minorities, semi-ideological clarity, and activist initiative. This approach is incompatible with the structural tradition of Hill and Manning. But Rees cannot openly break with Hill and Manning, because doing so would sever his connection to the Marxist lineage he needs for legitimacy. The lie solves this problem. By claiming that Hill and Manning “ignored structure,” Rees creates space to redefine Marxist method in a way that aligns with his own political preferences while appearing to defend the tradition he is quietly revising.

Rees’s Marxism and the English Revolution misrepresents the Marxist tradition by diluting its methodology and substituting dialectical analysis with political storytelling. It does not restore Marxist historiography; instead, it serves as a political act built on intentionally falsifying the tradition it claims to defend. The essay Rees called moronic starts by revealing this falsification, then defends the actual structural tradition that Rees mischaracterises, and ultimately places his book within the wider crisis in SWP historiography.

Rees believes that Marxist historians have “ignored structural questions,” leaving him to reestablish the correct methodological foundation. This is not a minor error or an unusual viewpoint; it is the core falsehood that supports the entire book. Removing this claim would reduce Rees’s work to a competent but derivative summary of Christopher Hill and Brian Manning. Keeping it, however, allows Rees to cast himself as the heroic restorer of a supposedly lost Marxist tradition.

The core issue is clear: the claim is absolutely false. It’s not merely debatable or incomplete; historical evidence has conclusively disproven it. Marxist historiography has depended on structural analysis for nearly a century. Rees’s statement essentially requires disregarding this entire intellectual tradition he claims to represent.

Christopher Hill’s work alone effectively reveals the falsehood of the revisionist view. His main arguments- the emergence of agrarian capitalism, the integration of market relations, changes in ideological superstructure, and the reorganisation of the gentry and yeomanry- are fundamental Marxist structural claims. Hill argued against revisionists by highlighting their neglect of structure, which led them to see the English Revolution merely as constitutional disputes and factional conflicts among elites. His repeated assertion that “economic change underlay political conflict” was central to his methodology and not a minor comment. To suggest that Hill overlooked structural causality is to distort the historiographical record.

Brian Manning’s work emphasises structural analysis. His examination of class division, popular mobilisation, and the makeup of radical movements forms a critical foundation. His studies of the London crowd, rural labourers, and middle classes focus on class formation from a structural perspective, not on stories of voluntary political activism. Manning’s book, The English People and the English Revolution, is a consistent structural analysis. Rees’s claim that Manning’s insights are “new evidence” is more about rhetoric than scholarship, aiming to boost his own position while dismissing the existing tradition.

Beyond Hill and Manning, the broader orthodox or classical Marxist approach encompasses the dialectical relationship between productive forces, relations of production, class formation, ideological superstructure, political agency, and structural constraints. This perspective is not detailed in his book on the English Revolution. Rees’s assertion that Marxists overlooked structural issues is thus incorrect; it appears to be a deliberate misrepresentation intended to introduce a new methodological approach.

The orthodox Marxist approach stands in sharp contradiction to Rees’s own practice. His reluctance to situate the English Revolution within the wider seventeenth‑century global crisis the Dutch revolt, the long decline of Spain, the fiscal breakdown of France, the stagnation of the Ottoman Empire marks a decisive departure from the structural, world‑system analysis that has always been central to Marxist historiography. A genuinely orthodox perspective connects national upheavals to the international dynamics of capitalist development; Rees consistently refuses to do so.

Likewise, an orthodox Marxist reading of the Leveller movement foregrounds the interplay of class formation, political agency, and the contradictions of emergent bourgeois society. It treats the Levellers not as isolated political actors but as expressions of deeper structural tensions within early modern England. This is precisely the kind of analysis Rees now claims Marxists have neglected, even though it is foundational to the tradition he purports to defend. In short, the very methods Rees dismisses define Marxist historiography at its strongest. His critique does not expose a weakness in Marxist analysis; it exposes a weakness in his own.

So, why does Rees cling to the lie? Because he depends on it. Without claiming that Marxists abandoned structural analysis, Rees cannot position himself as the one restoring Marxist methodology. He cannot justify his contribution or elevate his work above the tradition he summarises. Thus, the lie is not accidental but a political necessity: a tool Rees uses to turn a derivative book into a supposed breakthrough in method.

Manning: Class Segmentation and Popular Mobilisation

Brian Manning’s contribution to Marxist historiography is a thorough and detailed analysis of class division and popular mobilisation during the English Revolution. While Christopher Hill outlined broad structural changes such as the transformation of agrarian capitalism, market expansion, and ideological shifts, Manning focused on how these large-scale pressures appeared in everyday life, political action, and ordinary people’s collective efforts. His work directly challenges the false image Rees promotes; rather than overlooking structural forces, Manning’s scholarship relentlessly explores the social roots of revolutionary politics.

Manning’s approach centres on the view that class is not an abstract idea but a tangible, lived, and segmented reality. He dismisses the idea of a unified “people” or a single “middling sort,” instead highlighting the detailed gradations of wealth, occupation, status, and political interest that influenced mobilisation. In “The English People and the English Revolution,” Manning shows that the societal fracture during the revolutionary crisis was far more complex than the simple binary distinctions revisionists prefer. Artisans, small producers, urban shopkeepers, rural labourers, tenant farmers, and soldiers each brought their own grievances and hopes to the revolution. Their political actions must be understood in light of their specific positions within a changing capitalist system.

Manning’s approach challenges Rees’s fundamental idea by not viewing popular mobilisation as merely spontaneous. Instead, Manning attributes it to structural pressures such as declining real wages, enclosure, inflation, the erosion of traditional rights, instability in petty production, and conflicts inherent in emerging market society. He sees the crowd not as a uniform group but as a result of societal tensions during a period of change. For instance, his study of London’s apprentices reveals how their fragile economic status, caught between guild rules and market forces, generated a unique form of radicalism that goes beyond simple ideological fervour.

Manning’s treatment of the New Model Army is equally significant. He avoids romanticising the soldiers as proto-democrats and does not attribute their politics solely to Leveller influences. Instead, he places the Army within the larger class framework: mainly made up of artisans, small producers, and labourers, whose shared experiences of military discipline, unpaid wages, and political disillusionment heightened their class awareness. Manning’s structural approach explains why the Army became a hub of radicalism: it brought together lower and middle-class segments in conditions that deepened their grievances and clarified their opposition to the ruling class.

Manning’s work also highlights the limitations of popular mobilisation. He demonstrates that class segmentation led not only to radicalism but also to conservatism, hesitation, and fragmentation. For instance, the petty bourgeoisie swung between advocating political reform and fearing social unrest. Rural labourers often lacked organisational strength, while small producers were caught between opposing aristocratic privilege and worrying about market competition. Manning’s structural approach explains these contradictions without moral judgment; they are the expected results of a society with unstable, contested, and rapidly changing class positions.

This type of analysis is exactly beyond Rees’s scope. His voluntarist perspective requires a simplified view of society in which political actors shape history through clear ideology and organisational efforts. Manning’s research refutes this idea, showing that popular mobilisation is always influenced by structural factors, that class divisions influence political actions, and that revolutionary drive comes from material contradictions, not just ideological calls.

The SWP’s Voluntarist Pseudo‑Marxism

John Rees’s book, Marxism and the English Revolution, is built on a crucial falsehood: the idea that Marxist historians “ignored structural questions.” This is not a minor exaggeration or mistake; it is the core of his argument. If you remove this claim, the entire argument falls apart. Without it, Rees’s work merely rehashes Hill and Manning’s ideas, claiming methodological novelty while really just recycling existing views. This falsehood is not just a convenient misdirection; it is vital for supporting the political and intellectual story Rees aims to tell.

To understand why Rees depends on this distortion, it’s essential first to recognise the SWP’s political culture. The Socialist Workers Party has historically built a myth that it alone keeps the true revolutionary tradition alive, standing against a world filled with degenerates, revisionists, and heretical academics. This self-image demands ongoing ideological upkeep. Each action is seen as a rescue: Marxism is constantly in crisis, always under threat, and in need of revival— with the SWP as the perpetual saviour. This story matters; it shapes how members view history, politics, and theory.

Rees’s historiography reflects this political culture directly. His earlier work, notably The Leveller Revolution, shows a clear voluntarist bias. His narrative mainly focuses on ideological actors, radical minorities, and parliamentary strategies, while downplaying structural factors like class formation, economic change, and the tensions within bourgeois society. This voluntarist focus is deliberate, aligning with the SWP’s view that revolutionary action depends mainly on political will, ideological clarity, and organizational effort. Although structural issues such as economic crises, shifting class dynamics, and changes in productive forces are mentioned, they are considered secondary. The SWP emphasizes that the key driver of revolution is always the subjective element: the revolutionary party and its members.

This worldview inevitably shapes how the organisation writes history. Rees’s stories tend to overemphasize the importance of political minorities and ideological figures. The Levellers are portrayed as a precursor to the SWP, motivated more by ideological purity than by the pressures of early bourgeois society. Similarly, the New Model Army is seen as radical not because of its class makeup, material concerns, or its role in the revolutionary crisis, but mainly due to agitators’ influence. This approach overstates political agency and downplays structural causes. Such a perspective reflects a voluntarist pseudo-Marxist view.

This voluntarist distortion conflicts with the Marxist tradition Rees claims to defend. Hill and Manning—whom Rees both references and undermines—were thoroughgoing structural historians. They believed political behaviour stems from material contradictions: falling real wages, enclosure, inflation, the loss of traditional rights, and the fragility of small-scale production. They argued that structural forces, not ideological persuasion, drive class consciousness. Rees struggles to fully adopt this approach because it conflicts with the SWP’s political identity. If structural forces shape history, activist minorities are inherently limited. If class formation guides political actions, voluntarist interventions can’t replace material analysis. The SWP’s narrative demands a history where political minorities—like the party—play pivotal roles.

This is why Rees must distort the Marxist tradition. He cannot openly reject Hill and Manning; doing so would sever his link to the lineage he needs for legitimacy. But he also cannot adopt their structural method, as it contradicts the SWP’s voluntarist politics. The solution is to rewrite the tradition: to claim that Hill and Manning “ignored structure,” thereby creating space to redefine Marxist methodology in a way that aligns with SWP voluntarism while appearing to defend the tradition he is quietly revising.

The falsehood also functions as a rhetorical tool. By claiming that Marxists have traditionally ignored structural questions, Rees can present familiar ideas as new discoveries. When he talks about class segmentation, inheritance pressures, or the dilemma of second sons, he casts these as revelations rather than longstanding insights. This strategy hinges on convincing the reader that Marxists have overlooked these issues. The lie acts as a marketing tactic: old ideas are repackaged as innovations. Rees positions himself as the guardian of methodological correctness, a role that holds significant influence within the SWP, where theoretical authority is linked to organizational power. Therefore, the falsehood serves both intellectual and political purposes: it boosts Rees’s stature within the party by portraying him as the defender of “real” Marxism.

Ultimately, Rees’s claim is a necessary falsehood because his analysis cannot match the depth of the established tradition. Hill’s dialectical approach to class formation, Manning’s comprehensive mapping of popular mobilization, and the broader Marxist analysis in The Algebra of Revolution reveal the superficiality of Rees’s voluntarist view. If Rees recognized the tradition’s complexity, his book would seem shallow and derivative. Thus, this falsehood acts as a shield, protecting his work from the standards of the very historians he aims to emulate. Without it, his argument would lack originality, methodological strength, and political significance. The falsehood is the foundation of his entire argument; remove it, and his book falls apart.

The Levellers and the Problem of Class

A thorough Marxist review of the Levellers must start with the understanding that they were not a uniform “radical democratic” group, nor a static embodiment of abstract political ideals. Instead, they were a class-divided movement emerging amidst the contradictions of early capitalism in transition. Their program, language, and organisational styles can only be properly understood by placing them within the material conditions that influenced their social base. This is where John Rees’s voluntarist approach falls short. By emphasising ideological actors and political minorities, he obscures the structural roots of Leveller politics and reduces a complex class movement to a mere activist story.

Rees often suggests the Levellers were a unified group of enlightened radicals pushing history forward. In reality, they were a coalition of diverse class factions, each driven by different grievances, interests, and future goals. This included independent artisans, small producers, urban shopkeepers, radicalised soldiers, disaffected gentry, and religious sectarians, all shaping the movement’s ideas and structure. Their unity was fragile, dependent on shifting class roles, and always threatened by internal tensions. Viewing the Levellers as a single ideological movement ignores the contradictions that actually defined them.

The roots of Leveller politics are deeply tied to the transformation of English society during the rise of capitalism. Small-scale producers in London, such as printers, brewers, metalworkers, and cloth finishers, faced growing competition, unstable markets, and diminishing traditional protections. Their political demands for legal equality, magistrate accountability, and limits on arbitrary authority weren’t purely ideological but were defensive measures against the insecurity created by the market economy. Their focus on property rights, fair contracts, and the importance of small ownership reflected their class position: they were neither remnants of feudalism nor full proletarians, but early bourgeois democrats aiming to secure their footing in a rapidly shifting world.

The soldiers of the New Model Army were another key part of Leveller strength. Their radicalisation stemmed not only from ideological influences, as Rees’s voluntarist view claims, but also from tangible grievances: unpaid wages, fears of disbandment, resentment towards the social hierarchy among officers, and the shared experience of discipline. The Army acted as a crucible for class consciousness, bringing together artisans, labourers, and small producers in conditions that heightened their opposition to the ruling class. Therefore, the Leveller impact within the Army stemmed mainly from structural factors, not solely from ideological brilliance or activist efforts.

Even among the Leveller leaders, class divisions created tensions. Lilburne’s support for small property, Overton’s radical natural-rights ideas, Walwyn’s focus on religious toleration, and the Rainsborough brothers’ call for political equality all showed different class perspectives. Their unity was based on strategy, not shared structure. The movement’s fall after 1649- its failure to maintain mass support, its fragmentation under repression, and its inability to develop a unifying program for diverse class groups- was not a moral failing but a structural outcome. The Levellers were a class group that was too limited, contradictory, and still developing to succeed in a bourgeois revolution whose main forces demanded stability, hierarchy, and property requirements.

Rees cannot admit this explicitly. His voluntarist pseudo-Marxism simplifies society, imagining political minorities such as the SWP having decisive influence. Consequently, the Levellers appear as a unified ideological vanguard, with their class conflicts minimised, their structural origins hidden, and their political flaws moralised rather than examined. This creates a history that reflects the SWP’s political mythology rather than the true material conditions of seventeenth-century England. A Marxist analysis shows the opposite: the Levellers were a class movement shaped by structural forces, radical in appearance but limited in substance, reflecting the hopes and fears of early bourgeois society. Their importance lies in their contradictions that Rees’s voluntarism cannot accept and thus must suppress.

The Absence of Dialectics

The most critical flaw in John Rees’s Marxism and the English Revolution is its almost complete lack of dialectical analysis. This isn’t a minor error or just a technical omission; it’s a core failure that compromises the entire argument. Marxist historiography isn’t merely about pinpointing class interests or describing political figures. It’s a methodological approach, a way of understanding history’s contradictory movements, the relationship between structure and agency, tensions within class groups, and the ongoing connection between ideology and material circumstances. Without dialectics, Marxism reduces to a political story. Rees’s book is more of a narrative than a rigorous method.

Dialectics starts with contradiction, emphasising that social structures are always changing, never static, harmonious, or reducible to simple categories. The English Revolution was a crisis caused by conflicts between rising capitalist relations and declining feudal structures. It was fuelled by contradictions within the ruling class, the emergent bourgeoisie, between productive forces and relations of production, and between ideological ideas and material realities. Thinkers like Hill, Manning, Dobb, Hilton, and the broader Marxist tradition recognised this, with their work deeply rooted in dialectical analysis. In contrast, Rees’s book views contradictions more as narrative inconveniences.

The clearest example is his approach to class. Rees often reduces complex class structures into simple political categories. Rees portrays the Levellers as a unified ideological group, ignoring their composition as a coalition of artisans, small producers, soldiers, and disaffected gentry. Similarly, the New Model Army is seen as radical mainly because of agitators, rather than the structural forces shaping its class makeup. Political minorities are viewed as decisive actors not because they reveal material contradictions but because Rees’s voluntarist approach compels this view. Dialectics is replaced with a form of political romanticism.

Rees’s approach to ideology is revealing in its divergence from traditional Marxist views. While Marxist historiography maintains that ideology is grounded in material conditions shaped by class experience, economic forces, and social conflict, Rees treats ideology as largely autonomous. He emphasises political clarity, organisational effort, and ideological dedication as key drivers of historical change. This perspective aligns more with activist idealism than classic Marxism, reflecting the SWP’s belief that revolutionary action depends mainly on willpower rather than structural factors. His deliberate lack of dialectics reflects his political stance.

Rees also misses the dialectical link between structure and agency. In Marxist theory, agency is always shaped by structure. Political actors do not exist independently of society; they reflect its contradictions. The Levellers did not develop their programme purely from ideological innovation. Instead, they expressed the tensions within early bourgeois society, such as insecurity in petty production, unstable markets, and declining traditional protections. The Army’s radicalisation stemmed not only from agitators but also from its class makeup, material grievances, and collective discipline, which heightened awareness of social conflict. Rees’s voluntarism fails to account for this, as he tends to simplify the dialectic by reducing agency to political action and treating structure as a static background.

Rees’s treatment of the revolutionary process notably lacks dialectical analysis, which is most damaging. The English Revolution was not a straightforward sequence led by ideological minorities. Instead, it was a complex movement characterised by conflicting class interests, shifting alliances, and political outcomes arising from the interplay of structural forces. Hill’s work reflects this complexity, while Manning’s provides detailed mapping. Rees’s narrative simplifies this into a story of radical actors driving history, eliminating dialectics and echoing the SWP’s political mythology.

In summary, Rees’s historiography is not genuinely Marxist because it lacks dialectics. It substitutes contradiction with coherence, structure with agency, and material analysis with ideological voluntarism. This pseudo-Marxist approach fails to explain the English Revolution because it cannot understand the inherently contradictory nature of historical change.

6. Rees’s “New Evidence”: Old Wine in New Bottles

A key aspect of John Rees’s ‘Marxism and the English Revolution’ is his repeated claim that he has found “new evidence” related to class division, inheritance pressures, and social dynamics during the English Revolution. This assertion is central to how he presents his work, as it enables him to position his analysis as groundbreaking, suggest that earlier Marxist works missed vital material, and portray himself as the scholar who correctly places structural analysis at the forefront. However, similar to the book’s initial falsehood that Marxists “ignored structure’ this claim of originality quickly falls apart under even basic examination. What Rees claims as new evidence is essentially old ideas repackaged for an audience presumed unfamiliar with existing historiography.

For instance, his discussion of the “second sons” problem- the demographic and inheritance pressures that split the gentry and fuelled political radicalisation- is presented as a discovery. Rees treats this as a structural factor previous Marxists overlooked. However, Christopher Hill had already examined this issue extensively in works like The Century of Revolution and The World Turned Upside Down. Lawrence Stone’s detailed research on aristocratic family structures covers similar ground, and Manning included it in his analysis of class segmentation. Even Rodney Hilton, decades earlier, acknowledged the importance of demographic pressures in influencing political behaviour. Therefore, Rees’s so-called “new evidence” is actually a selective restatement of well-established scholarship.

The same pattern is evident in his analysis of class segmentation. Rees often argues that Marxists overlooked the complexities of class divisions among the middle classes, the Army, and the urban petty bourgeoisie. However, Manning’s work addresses this issue directly. In “The English People and the English Revolution,” Manning details class segmentation more thoroughly than Rees ever does, identifying artisans, small producers, apprentices, labourers, and soldiers as distinct groups with unique interests, grievances, and political paths. Hill’s research also highlights the varied development of class consciousness among social groups. Therefore, Rees’s claim to originality is not only incorrect but also disrespectful to the scholarly tradition he seeks to defend.

Even Rees’s discussion of popular mobilisation, touted as a breakthrough in understanding the social roots of radicalism, merely restates ideas that Manning, Hill, and Hilton explored decades ago. The notion that economic pressures, market instability, and the weakening of traditional safeguards influence political behaviour is well-established and forms the basis of Marxist historiography. Rees’s effort to claim these as new insights is more a rhetorical tactic than a genuine scholarly contribution.

Rees needs to present old arguments as new because his entire project relies on the illusion of innovation. Acknowledging that Marxists have already examined class segmentation, demographic pressures, and structural causality would make his book seem derivative- merely a competent summary of Hill and Manning rather than a true methodological breakthrough. Claiming novelty helps him elevate his work above the tradition he summarises, positioning himself as the scholar who finally revives Marxist method and justifying the book’s polemical tone.

The European Crisis: A Missed Opportunity

Another key weakness in John Rees’s Marxism and the English Revolution is his superficial focus on the wider seventeenth-century European crisis. This oversight is significant because understanding the English Revolution requires considering the continental upheavals that shaped its historical context. The crisis of feudalism was not unique to England but was a continent-wide upheaval. Any Marxist analysis that overlooks this broader European backdrop remains incomplete. Rees’s neglect highlights the limits of his voluntarist approach and his failure to grasp the era’s dialectical movement.

The seventeenth century was characterised by a widespread crisis impacting all major European powers. Spain’s decline, caused by financial strain, military overreach, and the collapse of silver income, disrupted the European power balance. France faced ongoing financial crises, peasant rebellions, and the Fronde civil war that exposed serious contradictions in absolutism. The Dutch Revolt highlighted the disruptive potential of bourgeois forces challenging feudal systems. The Thirty Years’ War shattered the Holy Roman Empire, devastated central Europe, and revealed the fragility of feudal political structures. Even the Ottoman Empire faced stagnation and administrative difficulties. England also fit this broader pattern of structural decline, not an isolated case.

Marxist historiography has long acknowledged this point. Scholars like Hill, Anderson, Brenner, and the broader tradition place the English Revolution within the wider European framework. They see the crisis as caused by contradictions between rising capitalist relations and waning feudal structures, along with shifts in productive forces, demographic pressures, and the uneven development of state forms. The English Revolution exemplifies this broader crisis, with specific outcomes but a fundamental connection to continental developments. Rees’s inability to incorporate this context is therefore more than an oversight; it reflects a methodological shortcoming.

Rees’s voluntarist perspective struggles to explain the European crisis because it conflicts with his broader political narrative. If the English Revolution was part of a larger, Europe-wide structural change, then political minorities and ideological figures cannot be seen as the main catalysts of historical shifts. Instead, groups like the Levellers, Army agitators, and radical MPs are better understood as symptoms of deeper systemic contradictions. The SWP’s belief that small activist groups hold decisive influence cannot be compatible with a view that stresses broader continental forces. To maintain his voluntarist model, Rees likely must minimise or ignore the European crisis.

This omission has tangible consequences. Without considering the European context, Rees struggles to explain the profound fracture of the English ruling class, the collapse of the monarchy, the Army’s radicalisation, or the revolution’s intense ideological ferment. These phenomena were not solely English; international forces shaped them. For instance, the English state’s fiscal crisis was related to the costs of warfare on the continent. The period’s ideological radicalism was shaped by Dutch republicanism, French Huguenot ideas, and broader Protestant networks. The structural pressures behind the revolution extended beyond England’s borders.

In brief, Rees’s approach to the European crisis misses an opportunity because it highlights his method’s shortcomings. A thorough Marxist analysis requires understanding the complete set of structural forces. Rees’s voluntarism falls short. His omission is deliberate, reflecting a pseudo-Marxist stance that fails to incorporate history’s full dialectical development.

Conclusion: A Book Built on a Lie

John Rees’s Marxism and the English Revolution appears as a revivalist work, aiming to restore Marxist methodology and counter perceived neglect. However, beneath its rhetoric, the book is based on a falsehood, relying on selective quotations, omissions, and a voluntarist perspective that conflicts with the core Marxist tradition it seeks to defend. The core falsehood is the claim that Marxist historians “ignored structural questions.” This assertion underpins Rees’s entire argument. Remove it, and his work loses its distinctiveness, urgency, and justification. With it, he portrays himself as a hero reestablishing a method that he argues was never truly lost.

The claim’s falsehood is clear. Hill, Manning, Hilton, Dobb, Brenner, and Anderson, all representing the Marxist tradition, are characterised by their focus on structural analysis. Their studies explore class development, economic changes, ideological superstructures, and the contradictions inherent in emerging capitalist societies. They situate political actions within material conditions rather than the ideological clarity of activist minorities. They regard the English Revolution as a crisis shaped by structural factors, not as a platform for voluntarist heroics. Therefore, Rees’s claim that these historians overlooked structure is not just wrong; it deliberately misrepresents the historical evidence.

The falsehood is politically motivated because Rees’s approach cannot withstand the structural tradition. His voluntarist pseudo-Marxism emphasises ideological actors, parliamentary radicals, and activist minorities, treating political agency as independent, ideology as crucial, and structural forces as merely background. This view reflects the SWP’s political myth, where small activist groups are seen as decisive in shaping history. However, it conflicts with the Marxist method, which argues that structure always shapes agency, class consciousness arises from material contradictions, and political actions mirror social tensions during transition.

Rees cannot openly oppose Hill and Manning because doing so would break his link to the lineage essential to his legitimacy. However, he cannot fully endorse their approach either, as it conflicts with the SWP’s voluntarist politics. His solution is to reinterpret the tradition by claiming that Hill and Manning “ignored structure,” creating room to redefine Marxist methodology in a way that supports SWP voluntarism while seemingly upholding the tradition he is subtly altering. This deception is thus not a mistake in thinking but a strategic political move.

This distortion has a significant impact. Rees’s book simplifies class divisions, removes contradictions, and distorts complex social structures into basic political categories. The Levellers are portrayed as a unified ideological force rather than a diverse coalition of artisans, small producers, soldiers, and discontented gentry. The New Model Army is seen as radical due to agitators, not its class makeup or economic grievances. The European crisis is treated as an afterthought instead of a vital structural factor in understanding the English Revolution. Dialectical methods are entirely omitted, replaced by a focus on narrative consistency and activist romanticism.

A Marxist perspective shows that the English Revolution was driven by structural crises caused by internal conflicts within the ruling elite, tensions in the developing bourgeoisie, and a continent-wide feudal collapse. The Levellers represented a faction of this emerging bourgeois society, voicing its hopes and fears. The army became more radical as its class makeup and material circumstances fostered greater awareness of social conflicts. While political minorities were significant, they primarily reflected underlying contradictions.

Rees’s book cannot address this complexity because it is based on a falsehood a necessary lie to uphold a voluntarist perspective, to promote his own interventions, and to reshape the Marxist tradition to fit the SWP’s image. It does not restore Marxist historiography but serves as a political act, a pseudo-Marxist story that weakens the method it claims to revive. A book founded on a lie cannot withstand scrutiny. Once the falsehood is revealed, Rees’s book collapses under the burden of the tradition it seeks to distort.

Endnotes

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Marxist Sources

• Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850.
• Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
• Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (especially the 1859 Preface).
• Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
• Karl Marx, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany.
• Karl Marx, England’s 17th-century revolution (articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung).
• Friedrich Engels, The Peasants’ War in Germany.
• Friedrich Engels, “The English View of the Internal Crisis” and “The Internal Crises” (Rheinische Zeitung, 1842).
• Friedrich Engels, Outline of a Critique of Political Economy (1843).

Classical Marxist Historiography on the English Revolution

• Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down.
• Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution.
• Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution.
• Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution.
• Brian Manning, The Far Left in the English Revolution.
• George Thomson, The First Philosophers (for structural/class formation context).
• Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free.

World‑System and Seventeenth‑Century Crisis Literature

• Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, Vols. I–III.
• Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (for systemic cycles of accumulation).
• Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State.
• Eric Hobsbawm, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (essays in Peasants and Politics).
• Jan de Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age.
• Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century.
• Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall.
• J.H. Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares (Spain’s fiscal-military crisis).
• Rifa’at Ali Abou-El-Haj, The 1703 Rebellion and the Structure of Ottoman Politics (for Ottoman stagnation debates).

Levellers, Radical Democracy, and Class Formation

• Rachel Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution.
• David Wootton, Political Writings of the Levellers.
• A.L. Morton, The World of the Ranters.
• Henry Holst, The Levellers and the English Revolution (Marxist tradition).
• John Rees, The Leveller Revolution (to situate and critique his interpretation).

Revisionist and Post‑Revisionist Historiography (for contrast)

• Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War.
• John Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces.
• Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed.
• Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War.
• Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire.

Contemporary Marxist Theory and Method

• Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism.
• Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre‑Industrial Europe.”
• Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648.
• Alex Callinicos, Making History.
• Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (for crisis theory context).

General Marx Bibliographies (for further reference)

• Marxists Internet Archive, Source of Marx/Engels Works by Date.
• Andrew Chitty, A Marx Bibliography (University of Sussex).