The Pentrich Historical Society’s webpage offers some great on-line sources for information on the Pentrich Rising of 1817 (including Tony Bunting’s very useful dissertation). Also many other sources (Protestation Returns) which may be of interest.
An interesting post by Oxonienses concerning Professor Macinnes’ withdrawal from working as a consultant on this new BBC history series, fronted by the now ubiquitous Neil Oliver. The article in the Scotsman (unfortunately the link no longer appears to work) certainly appeared to cause a storm, with over 600 comments on the post. I have to say that it sounds to me as if the problems with the series as described by Prof Macinnes have less to do with an Anglo-centric perspective and more to do with the overall conservatism of the directors and producers of TV history. Simon Schama’s History of Britain was, after all, really a history of the monarchy (at least David Starkey’s C4 series was upfront about this). Justin Champion did a very good job of unpicking the problems with TV history in his review of Schama’s series for HWJ.
Falls next Saturday (17th May). Programme now up. Speakers include the ever-present Tony Benn and Revd. Giles Fraser (of Putney Debates fame.) This year’s theme ‘Time for a Written Constitution?’
I can’t go this year, but I went last year (see previous posts) and can thoroughly recommend it as an enjoyable day out for anyone interested in left-wing politics, men (and women) dressing up as soldiers and tea and cakes.
My pages for the BBC’s History website on the Glorious Revolution have finally gone live. Everything that you ever wanted to know about 1688 in about 1500 words.
I’ve only just come across the above website, which is a great free resource for those interested in the radical writer, satirist and bookseller William Hone. Includes biographical information and a large number of electronic versions of his writings.
If you live anywhere near London (or even if you don’t) and have any interest in Shakespeare, theatre, or medieval history, then you need to go and see the RSC’s fabulous current production of Henry VI. This is the first time that I have seen the play staged and they’ve really done a fantastic job. The thing that really blew me away was the treatment of Cade’s rebellion in pt. 2. The director really got the carnivalesque nature of early modern rebellion across, as well as keeping with Shakespeare’s rather ambiguous attitude towards the rebels in the play. I’m not sure how much ‘expert’ input into the production there was, though I noted that Andrew Hadfield contributed to the programme notes. (In fact, I have just been reading Hadfield’s very interesting article on republican influences in Henry VI - ‘The Political Significance of the First Tetralogy’ in J. F. McDiarmid ed The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2007), ch. 8).
Also, the play gave me a chance to do a bit of academic-spotting. I spied Brian Cummings and Warren Cherniak. I also thought I saw Andrew Gilligan, but realised it was just another bald, pudgy man in a suit. I better stop there before this blog turns into the 3am Girls.
Anyone know what has happened to early modern history and Mercurius Rusticus? Both blogs seem to have disappeared, I hope only for a re-design in each case.
I’m not sure when, if ever, this review will appear in print, so thought I would post here anyway. As you can see, my impressions of the book are very similar to those of Mercurius Politicus.
The Truth about the English Revolution
It was Phillip Guedalla who said ‘history repeats itself: historians repeat each other.’ As the hundred and fifty plus pages of notes and bibliography accompanying Michael Braddick’s book demonstrate, writing a single-volume history of the English civil war is now something like attempting Monty Python’s ‘All-England Summarize Proust Competition.’ In the past few years alone we have been treated to three major popular histories of the civil wars and revolution: Austin Woolrych’s Britain in Revolution (2002); Diane Purkiss’s, The English Civil Wars: A People’s History (2006); and John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt (2007), none of them under 500 pages in length.
It is much to Braddick’s credit that he is able to cut a swathe through this dense thicket of historical writing on the civil wars and offer a genuinely fresh reading of England’s only true revolution. This is a ‘new’ history in two important senses: it summarises the most recent scholarship on the 1640s to present a narrative that is as up-to-date as possible and it supports that excellent synthesis of recent work with original research utilising the still under-explored evidence of cheap print.
Braddick takes his title from one of these civil war pamphlets, a relatively obscure work by John Benbrigge which offered a providential reading of Charles I’s surrender at Oxford in April 1646. Benbrigge viewed the defeat of the King as a divine punishment upon England for the sins of the nation. Yet, as Braddick points out, providence was a common political language in the 1640s, used by both Royalists and Parliamentarians to justify their actions. Competing claims based on similar authorities led the civil war to become a conflict over the meaning of truth itself. The difficulty of resolving truth-claims led some, like the members of Samuel Hartlib’s intellectual circle, to look to science to provide certainty. For religious radicals, tired of the seemingly endless claims and counter-claims based upon scripture, it led to a rejection of biblical authority. The 1640s then, were characterised by a cacophony of competing professions of truthfulness which not even ultimate Parliamentarian success on the battlefield could quell.
If Braddick’s book is alive to the anxieties, uncertainties and confusion of the day, it is also refreshingly honest about the difficulties and imponderables facing historians. For example, in his discussion of popular allegiance, Braddick rightly states that there is yet no fully satisfactory general explanation of why people chose sides in the civil war. The best that we can say is that we have a number of excellent local studies of allegiance which show us that it was a very complicated business, and the reasons why people chose sides varied from region to region and over time. This might have tested the patience of Braddick’s editor, (literary editors tend to prefer historians to skate over such vagaries) but it is a more truthful approach than is usually on display in mass-market works of history.
This recognition of the complexities confronting both contemporaries in the 1640s and their historians doesn’t prevent Braddick from providing a gripping narrative. A particular strength of the book is the way in which it combines a detailed discussion of the military campaigns with a nuanced treatment of the political debates. Political historians tend to be put off writing about military matters, even though the influence upon politics of events on the battlefield is obvious. Likewise, military historians are often too wrapped up in describing troop formations or assessing generalship to ask what these battles were being fought for. Braddick achieves this feat without ever allowing the reader to forget that these were very cruel wars with very high human costs.
We know how the story ends, with the trial and execution of the King in 1649. What is less certain is what the events of the 1640s mean. Throughout the work, Braddick strenuously avoids the terms ‘revolution’ or ‘revolutionary.’ In an open-ended conclusion he tells us that some of the writing that emerged from the ‘creative chaos’ of the 1640s (Thomas Hobbes, the English Levellers) might have fashioned a path from the world of the Reformation to that of the Enlightenment. Yet Braddick resists the persistent Whiggery that lurks beneath most works of recent popular history, the commonplace (and largely unsupported) assertion that past revolutions gifted present freedoms. If Braddick’s answer to the question of what the 1640s signified is less definitive than we are used to getting, it is also, again, more truthful.
I’m very pleased to say that the first book to be published in the Pickering and Chatto series, Popular and Political Culture in the Early Modern Period, which I co-edit, is coming out next month.
More details here.
