God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution – Christopher Hill
2007 Reading Challenge: Book 68 (the last of the year)
I like to read history books and, with this one, I felt I was straying outside my normal comfort zone and venturing onto new territory.
Periods that I like to read about generally include prehistory, the Roman empire, the Renaissance in general, and Tudor/Renaissance England in particular. The last such book I read was a biography of Elizabeth I, one of those ‘definitive biographies’ in its time, which offered me a nice, informative stroll through territory I was already extremely familiar with.
In contrast, I’d had a bit of a rude awakening regarding the Civil War and the Restoration courtesy of my favourite book of 2007, An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears. This splendid historical thriller is set during the period in question – and made me realise how just little I actually knew about it.
So off to consult the Googloracle and track down an authoritative biography of England’s most recent military dictator. This brought me to the feet of Christopher Hill who in 1970 wrote this ground-breaking biography.
I think the thing that makes it different is that the author, apparently a noted Marxist historian which explains his interest in revolutions, attempts to treat Cromwell’s life, rule and military career as a series of interconnected essays in which he tries to pull out key themes. The book still works perfectly well as a chronological narrative but also raises some extremely interesting questions. Here are a few which particularly engaged me:
- Discussion of the idea that England’s success as an Imperial power could be traced back to the Reformation and the Civil War – by making an early break with the Catholic Church and with feudal power it won a lead in developing the commercial and political structures necessary to be at the forefront of later economic and military developments.
- The interesting fact that Cromwell was the first English ruler to have a truly worldwide foreign policy – and the consequences of this, as mentioned above.
- This also ties into the odd notion, encapsulated in the title and which seems to turn up in all walks of life, that the English were somehow first among nations in the eyes of God, the chosen people, if you will. It’s a sentiment we’re probably most used to from Blake’s Jerusalem, but it crops up all over the place, perhaps also among those off to colonise the New World and win themselves a greater degree of religious freedom than they could get in England even under Cromwell.
- Rather than being a puritan ideologue trying to impose religious conformity, Cromwell may in fact far be better understood as a political pragmatist who aimed for a broad sweep of religious toleration – sometimes (gasp) even extending as far as Catholics.
- The notion that to have a democracy you must have an electorate that is sophisticated enough to sustain democracy – if the standards of literacy, education, freedom of thought etc. don’t exist in the first place (as Hill, a Marxist, argues was the case at this point and it’s easy to see where he’s going with it) then the notion of representative government is meaningless.
- The notion that the English Revolution failed not, as I had assumed, with the death of Cromwell, the lack of an obvious successor and the decision to negotiate with Charles Stuart about resuming the throne. Rather the author suggests that it had failed in 1653 after the dissolution of the Barebones Parliament and the appointment of Cromwell as Lord Protector. At this point, he says, the radical ideals that had inspired the revolution went out of the window, leaving Cromwell as a kind of referee whose highest purpose was to keep the various factions from each other’s throats.
- He was offered the option to be king – and thought about it extremely seriously, although he never accepted the title.
- Oliver Cromwell’s forebears took the name even though it had been through the female line – because, as relatives of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister and the man that played such a key part in the Reformation, they were hoping to capitalise a bit on the prestige it might confer.
I thought this was a great thematic study and I found it easiest to come to terms with when dealing with these broad issues. Occasionally it descends into dense detail – Cromwell’s role in subduing Ireland and Scotland was not commendable to our modern sensibilities and it’s a role spelled out remorselessly here. Likewise, the thread of parliaments, armies and oddly-named ordinances can be quite hard to keep hold of if you’re not a specialist in the period.
But, while containing a great deal of factual information, it also manages to transcend it to tease out the events of the middle 17th century and put them in context within a much wider sweep of English history. I feel much more enlightened about a number of things for having read it.
Some links:
- The Guardian: Christopher Hill’s obituary
- Channel 4 microsites: Monarchy – lots of info plus recommendations for further reading, including this book.
- The Cromwell Collection at Huntingdon Library
- A Cromwell bibliography and a Civil War one too
Tags: bibliography, biography, English Civil War, history