Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity

by Blair Worden

The scars of England's Civil Wars have never healed. In "Roundhead Reputations" Blair Worden shows how, over 350 years, the memory of the conflict has been a battlefield of its own. In every age, writers and readers have seen their own reflections in the conflict and have used images of Puritan rule to sanction programmes for the present. The "Cavalier" allegiance has been inherited by successive generations of Tories and Anglicans, the "Roundhead" one by their opponents. Contenting against each other, the two traditions have also divided within themselves. "Roundhead Reputations" tells the Parliamentarian side of the story. It explains how radical Whigs in the late 17th and the 18th century, combative Liberals and Nonconformists in the 19th, and Marxists in the 20th struggled against more establishment-minded Roundhead sympathizers for interpretative supremacy. Blair Worden begins by discussing a spectacularly successful literary the "Memoirs" of the regicide Edmund Ludlow, always a prominent source for the Civil wars, which were concocted for a Whig purpose and deceived posterity for three centuries. The middle section turns on representations of Algernon Sidney, a colourfully splenetic republican transformed by posthumous admirers into a plaster-saint. Finally he considers the fluctuating reputation of Oliver Cromwell, whom the Victorians, inspired by Thomas Carlyle's great edition of his letters and speeches, rescued from obloquy and made a cult figure -until socialists came to prefer the Levellers and Diggers, the Civil War heroes of modern times. For anyone interested in the Civil Wars, or in how history gets to be written, "Roundhead Reputations" should be enjoyable. Blair Worden is one of the leading scholars of the period, and this is a major work with large implications for an understanding both of England's sense of its own identity and of the relationship between past and present.

Genres: History, Civil War

387 pages, Paperback

First published January 11, 2001

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blair Worden's account of the use and (largely) misuse of the narrative surrounding the English Civil Wars during the subsequent three centuries is a masterpiece of intellectual history. It incidentally enlightens us about the drivers behind English politics throughout this long period.

We come across not only Algernon Sidney, the strange call-and-response relationship between country patriots and radical Whigs (an English dialectic seen as late as Brexit) and the politics of nonconformity but ideological transformers such as Macaulay (Catherine and Thomas) and Carlyle.

We are introduced to important less well-known figures such as John Tolland and Slingsby Bethel and to the constant re-evaluations of key seventeenth century figures such as Hampden, Vane, Harrington, Milton and, of course, Cromwell who towers over the period.

Worden is not very interested in the royalist (or conservative) narrative. He concentrates almost entirely on the use of the civil wars in defining narratives of dissent and as justifications for new turns in national ideology, whether radical, in the cause of 'national efficiency' or quasi-Marxist.

It is a wise book yet has its own ideological positioning - one I heartily approve of - the conscious attempt to expose ideological appropriation of historical narratives in order to enable historians and citizens to dispose of them and come to a view on what actually happened.

The importance of this is not to detach history and politics but to ensure that politics is conducted honestly because history is conducted honestly. It is, of course, fool's gold. Politics is never about honesty only about power relations but good history might disarm the worst combatants.

Similar books (if the historian in question was as disciplined and knowledgeable as Worden) might be written to the profit of our culture about so many other similar political appropriations of the past. This would be English scepticism at its best, sceptical of claims but not giving up on Truth.

The initial 40% of the book heavily concentrates on just one man, Edwin Ludlow, and his circle and how that circle redrafted his world view to suit later conditions. Ludlow's account of the civil wars had been thoroughly puritan and had contrasted with Clarendon's royalist narrative.

Worden points out that Ludlow's manuscript (Worden has clearly done the necessary close study of this and other texts) tells us that his primary drivers were religious and 'fanatic' by later standards but was well within the world view of many puritan contemporaries, just more radical.

Within a few decades of the Restoration, dissent from the Tory consensus and then from the moderate Whig compromises of 1688 existed in a world that found past 'enthusiasms' embarrassing. Ludlow's manuscript was redrafted into a more secular and avowedly political form.

A modern analogy might be pragmatic Islamists redrafting the fanatic texts of inspirers of Al-Qaeda and ISIS in order to build a viable Islamic democracy. A more trivial example is August Derleth reconfiguring Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos to be precisely what HPL did not intend.

Yet another, far more serious, might be the appropriations of the New Testament or of the works of Marx and Engels to build ideological machines designed to move in very different direction from their authors. Texts and history are just tools of current power relations.

Worden takes us, text by text, through the process by which what was happening in the 1640s and 1650s is transformed political generation by political generation into what each generation thought it more convenient to have happened. Reality is transformed along almost magical lines.

The culmination is the rediscovery of Oliver Cromwell in the nineteenth century which leads to the absurdity of Parliament placing his statue outside their own hallowed halls - absurd because Cromwell crushed Parliaments as a matter of policy in frustration at their ineptitude.

There is a nice moment where Liberals discover that their narrative of Cromwell as harbinger of national efficiency in the age of imperialism proves to be very inconvenient in keeping the Irish nationalists in some sort of line because of their own political narrative centred on Drogheda.

The Cromwellian absurdity seems less absurd as Worden places it in the context of wider political tensions but only because we have already had several chapters demonstrating a continuing propensity to re-invent reality with little investigation of the actual facts.

I am a victim of this myself. I studied the English Civil Wars at university in the 1970s and I am glad that I did not stop reading and learning because I was given a quasi-Marxist narrative that spilled over into Bennite myth-making of the civil wars as containing the seeds of working class revolt.

To be a university graduate in the late 1970s and a member of the Labour Party would mean accepting a narrative constructed out of Past and Present, E P Thompson, Christopher Hill and Christopher Hobsbawn. That was our world then and Worden disposes of it quite nicely.

Narratology in history is as normal as the narratological in all aspects of our culture which is one long drawn out rolling myth, punctuated periodically by ideological collapses due to hard facts of human behaviour on the ground only so that equally daft new arratives can arise in their place.

The fall of Kabul recently is a nice example of such a punctuation mark but I think we can be pretty sure that, now that one nonsense view of reality has ended, another one will arise to take its place and, like sheep, we will go with its flow as if it was an eternal truth.

It is not that all is nonsense. No narrative is entirely without foundation. Selection of facts can buttress almost any that are not entirely unhinged. Uncomfortably, Hitlerism was not as irrational as the narrative of his defeat demanded that it be but nor was it fully grounded in reality.

This book shows us one example of how ideological edifices can be built on weak foundations where 'activists', intellectuals and politicians simply refuse to ask the right questions about what people believed in the 1650s, what happened and what it actually meant to them.

At times, this is not an easy book for the general reader. It is on stronger ground in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than the twentieth. However, it repays the effort not so much in providing the truth of things but making us cautious about claims of truth from others.

Certainly, it has made me question whether my library of historical works should not be pruned with the same determination as I prune my books on business, science and technology. Many of them may be no better guide to reality than a physics book written in 1916.