The recent death of Christopher Hill noticed
numerous obituaries in the British press: an accolade rare for someone whose life was devoted to the history of the seventeenth century, even more unusual perhaps since Hill re-wrote the history of the English Civil War from a marxist perspective. Some of the obituaries reminded me that when I was at school in the mid 1960s, my teachers debunked Hill's writings by accusing him of a crude distortion of the history of the civil war (1640-45), and the subsequent period of republic and commonwealth. In retrospect, the interesting thing was why they took the trouble to wam us off him: it wasn't as if many school students were likely to rush off to read books not on the essential A-level reading list, after all. When I came to read what he had actually written, my eyes, like those of countless others, were opened to an entirely different, and thoroughly convincing, interpretation of some of the most critical events in English history.
Christopher Hill's first attempt at a new approach was The English Revolution 1640, a booklet published in 1940, shortly after he became a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. The rest of his career was spent there, and he became Master of the college in 1965.
From this location he was alleged to have been a soviet spy, an unlikely role for an academic who was openly a member of the Communist Party (until he resigned after Krusche's famous denunciation of Stalin in 1956), although it didn't stop his obituarists from harping on the subject.
Actually, he was involved in writing a large number of further books that took forward the basic ideas of his first essay, examining the social and political history of Britain during the seventeenth century, along with a popular and important biography of Oliver Cromwell (God's Englishman, 1970).
One of the most original was The World Turned Upside Down, (1972). This studied the radical ideas of the Levellers and Diggers and other groups of ordinary people who emerged during the struggle, and who developed forward-looking and very radical democratic ideas. In sum, it was Hill who made the case that the events of 1640-60 were not just a civil war, they were also a revolution. Such a thesis was unacceptable to old school historians. They were steeped in the idea that English history in was a long procress of gradual evolution until the high point was achieved (at first in the Victorian age, but subsequently advanced to whatever age the historian lived in), all by the peculiarly English route which managed to avoid the class struggles of other, less civilised, countries. In fact, the only 'revolution' acknowledged by traditional history was the so-called 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688, when James I was chased out of the country by the combined resistance of the whole ruling elite, with barely a finger lifted in opposition. Political overturn, but hardly a revolution: at least, not by contrast with the events of fifty years earlier.
So what did really happen during the English Civil War to justify calling it a
revolution? In simple terms, Charles I was first resisted by opponents who sat in the Westminster parliament, then defeated in a long and bloody civil war, then had his head cut off (1649), and a republic was declared. That was pretty radical for the time anyway. Oliver Cromwell, who had emerged as the most effective parliamentary general, ended up as Lord Protector of the English Commonwealth, and earned the rueful respect of later historians for his military victories over all his neighbours (Scots, Irish, Dutch).
Such dramatic political vacuum. Ever since the sixteenth century, significant changes had been taking place in the most economically developed parts of Europe. Capital had been accumulated and was becoming a significant element in the economies of countries like England.
Merchants and manufacturers still represented only small parts of the population, but money relations were replacing the feudal ties of medieval times, and were now becoming dominant in all parts of the economy including agriculture (where the overwhelming majority of people still lived and worked).
But the recently rich landowners (oversimplified as the 'gentry') faced a governing regime that simply ignored