A radical history of Britain

Edward Vallance, A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries – The Men and Women Who Fought for Our Freedoms (Little, Brown, 2009).*

In March earlier this year, Jack Straw and Michael Wills published a green paper on a potential Bill of Rights and Responsibilities in the UK. The foreword sought to put the proposals into historical context:

From the Magna Carta in 1215 and the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, the later Bill of Rights and Scottish Claim of Right in 1689, the great Reform Acts of the 19th and early 20th centuries, through to more recent landmarks, such as the foundation of the National Health Service as part of the welfare state, our history illustrates the proud traditions of liberty on which our current framework of democratic rights and responsibilities is built.

The green paper went on to stress that this British – not English or Scottish – tradition of freedom is continually and progressively improving:

We believe historians will bracket this Government’s reforms with the constitutional transformations of the 17th and 19th centuries as times of profound and invigorating change, when power was redistributed. These last ten years have been years of progress.

British rights and freedoms are here presented as part of a Whiggish narrative, which traces an unbroken thread from Magna Carta to the Human Rights Act and beyond. Many accounts of British radicalism share this Whiggish tendency. Where this narrative differs from many is in its confidence. The history of British radicalism is often written as a series of what ifs: what if the Levellers had been able to convince parliamentary grandees of their cause? What if the Chartists had been more successful in winning round the Victorian establishment? By contrast, the narrative presented by the green paper is far smoother, seeing an uninterrupted progression from one constitutional staging post to the next. In doing so, however, it manages to eliminate the personal from key constitutional developments. Freedoms are presented in the third person, not the first – enshrined in legal instruments, rather than achieved by actual people.

Ted Vallance’s new book on British radicals methodically dismantles this idea of a stately progress from one legal milestone to the next. The book starts by unpicking the myths that have grown up around the Magna Carta. Significant amendments were made to it in the fourteenth century, even before Sir Edward Coke set the Charter at the centre of an invented common law constitutionalism during the seventeenth century. Since then it has been invoked by everyone from the Chartists to Tony Benn. But despite its totemic role as a guarantor of inherent liberties, Vallance makes a strong case that the Charter actually guarantees very little. He uses this as a starting to point to suggest that it is actually the struggle of British people – not pieces of paper or legislation – which has resulted in the creation and extension of rights and liberty.

What follows is an attempt to sketch out an alternative narrative of British radicalism, showing the important of popular protest and rebellion in winning political and religious freedoms. Chapters on the Peasants’ Revolt and Jack Cade’s rebellion argue that politicised popular protest developed much earlier than is often thought. Such rebellions were not just about bread and butter issue, but also about the legal and political status of working people in post-feudal England. While Vallance stresses that radical ideas were not handed on, relay style, from one protest to the next, he does trace significant continuities between different protests. Medieval rebellions are demonstrated to have established a ritual and vocabulary which were adopted and reshaped by successive revolts against the crown. The ways in which each generation has reshaped and deployed the experience of past radicals goes on to be one of Vallance’s key themes.

Vallance also argues that such rebellions were less of a failure than has often been argued. A chapter on Kett’s rebellion, for example, pulls together research by Diarmaid MacCullough, Andy Wood and Amanda Jones to argue that it was far more than a doomed but heroic resistance by Robert Kett. The ‘commotion time’ actually saw most of southern and eastern England rise against the monarchy. Vallance argues that had it succeeded, it would have held out the prospect of a new ‘Common weal’ that would have given the commons far more of a role in the government of England.

These twin themes are picked up and expanded in the book’s chapters on seventeenth-century radicalism. Vallance pulls together findings from post-revisionist studies to argue that English society was deeply fractured during the early seventeenth century, and follows David Cressy, John Adamson and others in arguing that it was events spiralling out of control in the early 1640s that blew apart these fault lines. The book then sets the arguments of Levellers like John Lilburne, Richard Overton and William Walwyn in this context. The ‘reserved’ rights in the Agreement of the People are singled out in particular as an extremely significant step: the first time in British history that inherent liberties that did not derive their power from the monarch had been codified. Vallance’s arguments here are convincing: the Agreement itself, let alone its radicalism and innovation, is largely forgotten today outside academic circles, and yet many of the Charters and Codes that govern public services in the UK today derive their form, ultimately, from John Wildman’s inspiration. Where I was less convinced was in Vallance’s argument that Levellers ‘came within a whisker’ of having their aims implemented. While the Independent and army grandees did make common cause with the Levellers on significant issuesat certain points during the 1640s, there is room for debate on whether such changes could have been implemented, or whether the county gentry at large would have worn them.

Vallance concludes this section with an excellent overview of some of the other radical movements that blossomed during the later 1640s: Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, and the Ranters. He is sceptical of the arguments of Colin Davis and others which underplay the significant of the latter. I was particularly struck by his account of the Muggletonians: a sect who believed that God was a man who lived in a heaven six miles above the earth, whose death had resulted in Elijah and Abraham having to fill in for him until the resurrection. I hadn’t realised that Muggletonian beliefs lived on into the twentieth century, their last known adherent being an apple farmer from Kent who died in 1979.

As the narrativereaches the eighteenth century, Vallance starts with an account of Thomas Paine. He outlines how Paine’s difficult early life in England – with its financial and personal disasters – played an important part in moulding his political radicalism. He also stresses the significance of the fact that Paine abandoned the traditional appeal to history that had marked many previous English radical movements. For Paine, the myth of the ‘ancient constitution’ was just that, and rights instead were to be deduced from first principles. Importantly, too, Vallance puts Paine in a popular context by examining the role of corresponding societies in spreading and adapting his ideas., arguing that this saw the beginnings of a working-class activism. And he contrasts Paine’s work well with Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women. While Vallance agrees that the political gains of late eighteenth-century radicalism were relatively slim, he argues that it nevertheless laid the foundations for successes to come.

The book then turns to the ninetheenth century, again stressing that heroes of traditional narratives like John Cartwright still owed their importance to leading a wider, more popular agitation. The role of the Luddites in giving a sense of national unity to industrial unrest is drawn out particularly clearly, particularly their impact in uniting gentlemen and middling sort radicals. Vallance’s narrative of the events at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester particularly stands out. The chaos and bloodshed of what became known as Peterloo is told in sparse and unemotive language to allow contemporary voices to speak for themselves of the terror and tragedy that unfolded on 16 August 1816 – particularly the treatment that was handed out to women. For me this was one of the standout parts of the book.  Similarly impressive is Vallance’s account of the Chartist demonstration on Kennington Common in 1848, which wades through competing contemporary accounts to get to a more nuanced account of those who attended.

In the concluding section of the book, Vallance deconstructs the ‘personality cult’ surrounding Emmeline Pankhurst to argue that the suffrage movement actually owed a great deal to nineteenth-century radicalism. But he also seeks to overturn the argument that militant suffragettes played little part in the eventual decision to secure the vote for women. Militancy is seen as an end in itself, distilling ‘the essence of that revolutionary spirit’. In contrast, the post-war welfare state erected by the Labour government from 1945 onwards is seen as less radical, for all that it tried to cloak itself in a tradition of British radicalism.

Where the book left me wanting more was in the distinction between British and English. The book’s dustjacket talks in terms of British radicalism and British people, whereas Vallance actually argues that a truly ‘British’ radicalism only emerges after the Napoleonic period, but that radical movements before that period owed lots to non-English figures. He is up front in saying that as a result, he only offers an ‘enriched’ English account. This is a partial but reasonable solution to the ‘British problem’ that faces most historians of early modern Britain. To go further and produce a fully British account would result in a different, and probably unreadable book. But I was still intrigued by the links many English radical movements had beyond England, and ended up exploring the footnotes for more.

This review began with a summary of the UK Government’s most recent narrative on the British constitution. Despite its Whiggishness, the green paper did admit that:

This is contested territory. Constitutional reform always is.

The great strength of Vallance’s book is in how it stresses the extent to which our traditional narrative of ‘British rights’ is actually not contested – even when perhaps it ought to be. What I enjoyed most about it was how it restored the role of popular agitation and protest in securing rights. As Vallance concludes, ‘our freedom lies in our power’.

* Full disclosure – I was sent a review copy of this book by Ted. I hope I have treated it exactly as I would any other book I review on this blog.

The Noble Revolt

So, my first post. I haven’t actually started the Masters yet – that has to wait until October – but I thought I’d get into the habit of forcing myself to write, and to collect my thoughts. I’m going to start with a review of John Adamson’s recent book on the politics of the build-up to the English Civil War between 1640 and 1642, The Noble Revolt , which I have just finished re-reading.

I mention the fact that I have re-read it because this is not a small book, and it takes quite some time to absorb in full. The footnotes alone take up 191 pages, which should alert you to the fact that it gives an incredibly detailed coverage of the two years on which it focuses. The book is in many ways a prequel to Adamson’s PhD thesis on the role of the English peerage in politics between 1645 and 1649 (when the House of Lords was abolished). In his thesis, Adamson argued that the nobility’s role in civil war politics had previously been neglected, both by Whiggish historians concerned with seeing the conflict as the high road to nineteenth century democracy, and by Marxists presenting the period as one of class struggle. In particular, Adamson focused on the emergence of two groups amongst the peerage, each of which cooperated with their comrades in the Commons – a moderate, later Presbyterian group that was keen by the late 1640s to reinstall the king with only mild limits on his authority, and a more extreme group (the Independents). This split between Presbyterians and Independents had been established before Adamson’s thesis, notably by David Underdown in Pride’s Purge , but the centrality of the peerage had not been suitably brought out.

Adamson’s wider thesis was criticised in the early 1990s in a debate with Mark Kishlansky over whether Viscount Saye and Sele had had a hand in drafting the Heads of Proposals, rather than just Cromwell and Ireton as had been previously believed. The general consensus seems to be that Adamson’s evidence doesn’t prove this, but Adamson’s blistering response to Kishlansky’s original critique in the Historical Journal is still worth reading. The unfortunate thing about the debate was that it tended to damn the rest of Adamson’s much wider thesis; unfairly, in my view.

The Noble Revolt is a rehabilitation of that thesis, stretching Adamson’s arguments back into the early 1640s. He argues that Pym’s centrality in the move towards war has been overstated, and that instead we should look to a network of godly Puritan nobles, centred around Bedford and Warwick, excluded from power during the 1630s and anxious at the direction in religious and political policies were heading. Adamson is at pains to emphasise that it was a case of bicameral cooperation, rather than the Lords commanding the Commons; but he does make the point that it was the great houses of the English nobility who possessed the political and, importantly, military clout to take things to war. What follows is a case of gambles alternately paying off then failing and pushing factions further away from their opponents. In particular, Adamson draws out the role of the Scots, not as an invading army but as mercenaries invited to invade by the Warwick-Bedford faction. If the invasion failed or the plot was discovered, this was treason; and so the stakes in negotiations with the king could not have been higher. Adamson presents his evidence through painstaking analysis of letters, newssheets and other contemporary sources. His reconstruction of the Warwick-Bedford axis, and the factions within it, is highly convincing. Kishlansky has argued in the past that kinship connections do not necessarily make for political connections. However, the weight of familial, spiritual, political and financial connections – handily combined in involvement in the Providence Island Company for many within the group – are such that it is hard to refute Adamson’s reconstruction.

And there are some standout moments in that reconstruction. There is a shrewd look at the authorship of a pamphlet which leads him to conclude that it was authored by Oliver St John. There is the set of annotations on a document hand-written by Charles I and handed to Will Morray that Adamson discovered in a barn belonging to a distant descendant. The analysis of the factional politics over Strafford’s execution, as different parts of the group blew alternately hot and cold depending on relationships with the Scots, is outstanding – as is the atmospheric account of the trial itself (where one suspects Adamson sympathises with Strafford, lucid and calm again the bumbling and tongue-tied Pym).

However, there are some moments where Adamson over-reaches himself. His account of the previous historiography of the origins of the war focuses really only on Conrad Russell. There is no coverage of other historians from a wide range of theoretical or argumentative backgrounds. This extends through the book’s epilogue, where Adamson is keen to debunk Whigs and revisionists alike by finding a third way on explaining the origins of the war – but can coverage of only 1640-1642 cover enough of the origins of the war to adequately explain them? I don’t believe it can. What it can do is explain the move in Westminster and Edinburgh politics towards war; but it doesn’t explain the longer-term preconditions that allowed such a move to happen, nor does it cover the background to development of party and ideology in the aftermath of war breaking out. And Adamson’s argument that it was not a war of religion, but a war based on cold-blooded political concerns may be right, but doesn’t sit well with his other point that (rightly) religion cannot be separated from politics during this period. There is also the odd assertion where his evidence doesn’t quite do what he wants it to. Charles I’s complaint that he would be turned into a doge of Venice, and the existence of quotes from republican authors in Bedford’s commonplace book, doesn’t quite add up to a determined intellectual programme of "Venetianisation" of the English state. If anything I think that Adamson’s arguments of contingency and short-term political calculation apply here too, and that there was less of a coherent programme of political thought behind the Warwick-Bedford axis than he perhaps argues.

What takes the book beyond its arguments is the quality of the writing. Chapters start and end with some fantastic set-pieces – for example, Charles fleeing Whitehall in January 1642:

"From the cabin at the stern of the barge, Charles caught a glimpse of the gilded weather-vanes of Whitehall Palace before the boat turned westwards, past the Abbey, and under the great east window of St Stephen’s Chapel – the Commons’ chamber, and the scene of his most recent political debacle. It would be seven years before Charles saw his palace again".

We all know – but Adamson leaves unsaid – the reason why Charles would return. And this extract also gives a glimpse into Adamson’s excellent sense of London’s geography, both physical and political. The geographical networks of godly aristocrats, going from one great house to another or holed up in the chamber, are brought out superbly. London comes alive in the book as we realise how small and yet how divided it could be between the rival factions. There are superb passages on the indefensability of Whitehall, on the physical layout of Strafford’s trial, and on the scenes in Whitehall yards as crowds of apprentices jostled with each other.

The critical response to the book so far has been pretty good, although some reviews have been of higher quality than others. The Times was very positive without particularly engaging in the book’s arguments. Diane Purkiss’s review in the Financial Times probably owes more to Adamson’s own review of Purkiss’s recent book . The Spectator and the Telegraph were more considered. By far the best was Blair Worden’s lengthy meditation on the book in the London Review of Books – subscribers only, unfortunately, but it contained a fascinating insight into Worden’s work on Hugh Trevor-Roper’s papers and a book on the English Civil War that he never finished, but which covered similar ground to Adamson. It was also the only review so far to engage with the book’s arguments in a genuinely critical way.

As a final word, if you are interested in a summary by Adamson himself of his arguments, there is a recording of a reading he gave at the Hay festival available on the Guardian’s site . It costs a pound to buy but it is worth downloading.