jc davis - puritanism and revolution

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Puritanism and Revolution: Themes, Categories, Methods and ConclusionsReviving the English Revolution: Reflections and Elaborations on the Work of ChristopherHill by Geoff Eley; William Hunt; A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People: John Bunyanand His Church by Christopher Hill; John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus: TercentenaryEssays by N. H. Keeble; Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English RadicalReligion 1640-1660 by Nigel Smith; Puritans in Conflict: Th ...Review by: J. C. Davis

The Historical Journal, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Jun., 1991), pp. 479-490Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2639508.

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The Historical J7ournal,34, 2 (I99I), pp. 479-490Printedn GreatBritain

PURITANISM AND REVOLUTION: THEMES,CATEGORIES, METHODS AND CONCLUSIONS

Reviving the English Revolution: Reflectionsand Elaborationson the Work of ChristopherHill.Edited by Geoff Eley and William Hunt. London: Verso, I988. Pp. viii + 356. C24.95.A Turbulent,Seditious and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church.By Christopher Hill.Oxford: Clarendon Press, I988. Pp. xxi+394. CI9.50.John Bunyan: Conventicleand Parnassus: TercentenaryEssays. Edited by N. H. Keeble.Oxford: Clarendon Press, I988. Pp. X+278. [30.00.Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion I640-i660. ByNigel Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, I989. Pp. xv+396. ?4?.00.Puritans in Conflict: The Puritan GentryDuring and After the Civil Wars. By J. T. Cliffe.London: Routledge, I988. Pp. xi+255. J3o-0o-Two themes and an associated set of questions are evoked by all of these books. Thethemes, well worn by time and repeated re-examination, are 'Puritanism' and'Revolution'. The questions relate to the explanatory value, meaning and inter-relationship of those themes or categories. In implicit recognition of the agenda set forthe historiography of seventeenth-century England by marxist historians and marxisantorientations, they collectively pose the question, 'What can a marxist approachcontinue to contribute to our understanding of the crises of seventeenth-centuryEngland and the apparently related phenomena of Puritanism and revolution?'Persistently obscuring these central issues is the peripheral, but obsessional, one of'revisionism'. To make headway we had better begin there.

RevivingtheEnglish revolutions in too large measure dedicated to reviving ChristopherHill's reputation against a disastrously misread - at least in Eley's accounting of it -'revisionist' assault. It is as if a perfectly healthy and active man, going about hisnormal business, were to be seized by his friends and subjected to all the knowntechniques of resuscitation. There is a bewildering quality about the reaction, typifiedby Eley's absurd assertion that Hill's reputation was rather low amongst seventeenth-century historians in the I970S (the decade of The world turnedupside down ). Hill'scontribution has never been at a discount (p. 5) among serious students of seventeenth-century England and, ironically, those who have devoted most time to its criticalevaluation may perhaps claim to have attached most weight and seriousness to it.'There is an exaggerated tone of defensiveness, injured righteousness and, on oneoccasion, retributive violence about some of the contributions to this volume whichdoes less than justice to the historian who has engendered more serious debate aboutthe English revolution in the last fifty years than any other. For Christopher Hill is notonly a great historian but a great revisionist historian and, once we recognize that, theabsurdity of our current labelling obsessions - revisionist/anti-revisionist - becomestransparent.2 He, along with E. P. Thompson and others, has kept English marxist

Cf. John Morrill, 'Review article: Christopher Hill's revolution', History, LXXIV, 241 (I989),243-52.2 'Revisionism' is, of course, a concept with explosive overtones for the marxist tradition. I useit here in the neutral sense, in which it is accepted by most historians, of a willingness to question

17 479 HIS 34


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480 HISTORICAL JOURNALhistoriography empirically responsible and thereby capable of engaging in debate withthe broad community of English historians. He has kept it thinking, learning, evolvingand thereby influential.

The revisionist trajectory of Hill's prolific grappling with the English revolution hasan epic, Miltonic quality To miss this is not only to fail to understand why he has been- and continues to be - so important, it is also to impoverish the last half century of ourhistoriography. There has been, as Mary Fulbrook deftly demonstrates, an evolutionin Hill's historical sociology which shows him learning from other 'revisionists' andresponding with formulations which have moved the debate on. A key feature of thishas been his acceptance that the English revolution was not driven by a bourgeoisassault upon a feudal aristocracy but arose out of an irreparable split within the rulingclass, a split which reflected fundamentally different political, economic and culturalinterests. The eruption of lower-class radicalism realigned the ruling-class factions andultimately created that fatal English combination of repression and liberalism whichproved so fertile a ground for bourgeois capitalism. Puritanism and revolutioncontinued to be intertwined but in ways far more complex than the marxistformulations of the I930s, culminating in Hill's own The English revolutionI640, everallowed. What is distinctive about Hill's revisionism is that it is revisionism within atradition and it never breaks faith with that tradition. Again, as Fulbrook shows, thecontinuities in Hill's position have been the acceptance of marxist periodization, thebelief that the era of the 'English revolution' was a watershed, a crucible in whichEnglish society, culture and politics were transformed; a concern to reconcile a 'deepunderstanding' (p. 48) of impersonal historical forces with respect for the personalactors of the past; and a political engagement which seeks to recover the 'popularradicalism' of the past, a recovery which is itself a moral activity seen as freeing thepresent for a wider range of alternatives (pp. 33, 35). His revisionism has operatedwithin the framework of these attitudes and the assumptions underlying them. It isrevisionism within a tradition. Perhaps understandably, those who share that traditionshow a greater willingness to accept criticism from within its fraternal flow than fromwithout it.

What is valuable about Reviving the English revolution and it is, if one ignores acertain amount of moral outrage and posturing, a valuable collection - is that itillustrates the range of revisionisms which that tradition and Hill's influence as ateacher can generate. It also tells us something about the limitations which thattradition sets, and perhaps has to if it is not to disintegrate. For example, Phyllis Mack,approaching the radicals of the mid-seventeenth century from a gender perspective andemphasizing the patriarchalism of the non-Quakers, has to ask whether culture ratherthan class is the explanation. Lawrence Stone, in a republished essay, suggests thatenclosing 'bourgeois' landlords were more likely to be royalist than parliamentarian inthe Civil War. Peter Burke questions whether an anti-university radical like WilliamDell should be related to an 'underground' tradition of Anabaptists, Brownists and thelike. Cynthia Herrup, pointing to the fact that those who effectively ran the parishesand counties, and thereby the country, included many more social groups than thegentry and aristocracy, raises the possibility that the 'ruling class' was a socially diverseand complex phenomenon penetrating deep into the hierarchical society of earlyand, where necessary,discar-d eceived accounts. For some salutary remarkson revisionism/anti-revisionism n Stuart historiographysee Glen Burgess,'On revisionism:an analysisof early Stuarthistoriographyin the I970s and I98os', Historical ournal(forthcoming).


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482 HISTORICAL JOURNALdecades, 'which are for Hill, in spite of his knowing better,the Puritan Revolution', theradicals are 'religious crazies', pursuing a 'mad theology' (p. 25, my emphasis). Withsuch appraisal from within the tradition one wonders what possible additional damageHill's critics from outside of it can do.

Let us return to one of the best essays in the collection. In her penetratingexamination of Hill's historical sociology, Mary Fulbrook emphasizes the complexityand subtlety of his treatment of the history of ideas. She rightly repudiates RichardJohnson's charges of 'culturalism' but, in doing so, points to some unresolved tensionsin Hill's work. While class and culture interrelate, culture does not summarize all thereis to say about class, class does not explain all there is to say about culture. Ideas are'partially autonomous' (p. 44). This is all well said and we need to be reminded of itbut, in evaluating the work of an historian for whom ideas have been so important, thisis also where we should begin. There are parameters to the complex interactionamongst variables in Hill's historical sociology. What are they and how are theyjustified? We fade away from such questions with the observation that ' Hill's particularstrength has been richness of illustration and evocation, rather than rigour oftheoretical testing' (p. 48). An historian of Hill's superb craftsmanship may hold thebalance implicitly but in the hands of others it tends to fall apart.

To turn to a figure likeJohn Bunyan is to see an agenda of problems with which thisapproach must cope. In both doctrine and social position - though for different reasons- Bunyan rubs against the parameters of Hill's attempt to sustain interpretativepluralism within a marxisant tradition. The context within which Hill sets Bunyan isone of revolutionary consciousness, popular culture and plebeian unrest. But theenigma which Bunyan then becomes is barely tackled and never related to itsimplications for Hill's theoretical starting-point. A popular preacher of the leastpopular of doctrines, double predestination, a soteriology of imputed righteousness, afaith which was the most difficult of all works, Bunyan saw that faith as efficacious onlyfor the few who must nevertheless strive ceaselessly after a never-quite-won assurance.How this relates to the context in which Hill sets him never becomes clear. A prisonerfor his right to preach, Bunyan remained the most conservative of nonconformists, apassive millennialist who saw princes as the primary instruments of the SecondComing, counselled non-resistance and could honestly deny subversive intentions.'Bunyan's tactics were from any point of view sensible: non-resistance, adherence tothe truth, avoidance of scandal, readiness to co-operate with any state authority whichwould grant toleration.'5 In this sense, Bunyan should be seen as remaining closer tothe Lutheran/Calvinist insistence on subjection to authority of pre-war Puritans (andpost-war Anglicans) than to the context of interregnum radicalism.

Bunyan presents equal and not untypical problems on the front of social context.According to B. R. White, 'The "must haves", "presumablys" and "may havebeens " are part of the common stock of the candid Bunyan biographer',6 and Hill doesnot escape these sociological indeterminacies. Perhaps Bunyan's ancestors had beenemployees of the nunnery at Elstow. Perhaps Thomas Bunyan (John's great-great-grandfather) was already a protestant in 1542 (p. 4').- Perhaps John didn't see muchmilitary service; didn't dislike the army as such. Perhaps he volunteered for service inIreland, possibly out of boredom or because he hated papists or maybe because he wasconcerned about his arrears of pay (p. 46). How did Newport Pagnell, 'a hotbed of

' Hill, Turbulent,seditious andfactious people, p. 322. Cf. pp. 40, I07, I50-I, 332, 368-9, 373.6 B. R. White, 'The fellowship of believers: Bunyan and Puritanism', in Keeble (ed.), Bunyan,P. 3.


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REVIEW ARTICLES 483radical discussion', affect the young Bunyan? 'We can only guess' (p. 52). He may havebeen a leader of irreverent youths who could be called Ranters, 'for want of a betterword', and it may have been their political attitudes rather than their libertinism whichattracted him (p. 58). ProbablyBunyan sympathized with the exclusionists (p. 3 I I). Histeachings on humility might have embraced anti-deferential attitudes (p. 277). He mayhave considered co-operation with James II (pp. 3I4, 322). 'We cannot,' in the end,'be sure what Bunyan was actually thinking about contemporary politics in relation tothe millennium' (p. 334). 'There is no evidence to connect Bunyan with anyrevolutionaries. But it is not easy to be certain exactly where he stood, if he ever hada clearly defined position' (p. 3 I4). In the face of such honesty one has to ask whether,given the natureof the evidence, he most fruitful questions regarding context are being put.The socio-political blandness of the direct evidence and the difficulty of relating thestubbornly conservative Bunyan to the radical contexts Hill evokes certainly poseunresolved problems for the latter's approach.

Hill's biography of Bunyan is a story worth telling well told and one in which thedignity of the subject shines through, but it must be judged against the biographer'saspirations, aspirations which are central to Hill's treatment of the history of ideas. Theultimate objective of the biography is to bring Bunyan's ideas into focus against thesocial and cultural context of his times; 'to rescue him from those who see him as theanatomist of a timeless "human condition"' (p. vii). On the left hand, then, stands therevolution in all its material and cultural force; on the right hand the specific, butelusive, particular contexts in which Bunyan lived, preached and wrote. Hill'sdepiction of the historical context is thus a story of the English revolution as it mighthave come home to 'a tinker of Elstow, to a Parliamentarian soldier, to a nonconformistcitizen of Bedford' (p. 4). Is there, one wonders, no way in which the real Bunyanmight have escaped the fixing of the three right-hand categories or the left-handmetacategory? For the latter, it is now admitted, had little transformative impact onsome of the key structural elements of social reality. Reflecting on the power of J.P.sand landlords in the decades after i615, Hill observes, 'Forty-five years and onerevolution later not much had changed in this respect' (p. i8). Should one thereforebe assessing Bunyan against the absence of serious socio-political change rather thanagainst a background of what amounted to no more than the aspiration fortransformative structural change, an aspiration which Bunyan may not even haveshared? The Greavesian/Ashcraftian background of continuing radical ferment afterthe restoration never becomes a totally convincing milieu for Bunyan's shadowy lifeand it is worth remembering that, as far as we know, he was imprisoned for preachingwithout a licence, not for what he preached. If the revolt within the revolution of themid-century, the attempt to turn the world upside down, had at its heart the rejectionof the repressive mechanisms of sin and Hell,7 then Bunyan stands outside of it not onlyin terms of chronology but also of temperament. The burden of sin, the gnawing fearof damnation, the exhausting but never-ending struggle for assurance of a salvation towhich sinners can make no contribution, these are the hallmarks of Bunyan's pastoraland literary works. His six tests to know the Cross -justification, mortification,perseverance, self-denial, patience and communion with poor saints- are a prettytraditional, self-repressing lot.8 But whereas, for Hill, in the I640s and sos sin and Hell

7 Christopher Hill, The world turnedupsidedown: radical ideas duringthe English revolution(Harmondsworth, I975), ch. 8.8 Theheavenlyootman n Themiscellaneous orksof John Bunyan, d. Roger Sharrock (Oxford,


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REVIEW ARTICLES 485These readings bring us closer to a sense of Bunyan as a wrestler with dark and

complex truths, a minister of self-scrutiny, self-repression and unending struggle. It isnot, as yet, clear how affixing the labels of a social category that is never going to beuncontentious can sharpen or refine that perception.10 But, equally, it has to be saidthat the application of denominational or sectarian labels to Bunyan, and so manyothers like him, darkens rather that illuminates our understanding of the man and hiswork. The first sign that something is wrong is the perplexing variety of labels whichare held to be appropriate. For Sharrock he is a Baptist (p. 78), a designation qualifiedby Greaves to 'open-membership Baptist' (p. 35). For White he became, was andremained an Independent (p. 4). Despite his own stress on the influence of Luther,Bunyan was, Wakefield, Kaufmann and White insist, a Calvinist."1 But the more weread Bunyan himself on such labels and the forms they are held to represent the lessinstructive it becomes to 'fix' him with them. 'As for those titles of Anabaptists,Independents, Presbyterians, or the like, I conclude that they came neither fromJerusalem nor from Antioch, but rather from Hell and Babylon, for they naturally tendto division'.12 As Gordon Wakefield puts it, 'Christ is the way; not any other name orsect' (p. II6). The congregation which Bunyan joined in the early I650s offeredChristian fellowship to all who showed faith and holiness of life 'without respect to thisor that circumstance or opinion in outward or circumstantial things'. New memberswere called upon to agree formally and solemnly that 'union with Christ is thefoundation of all saintes' communion, and not any ordinances of Christ, or anyjudgement or opinion about externalls'.13 The eschewing of forms as fleshly anddivisive has its paradoxes for any attempt to hold communion with the saints, but wemust not underestimate its seriousness and influence after a decade of fratricidalreligious conflict and unresolved division. Like most of his contemporaries, Bunyancould not accept that anything less than unity was God's purpose for his children.14 Hisantiformalism was part of a widespread resistance to an emphasis on names, definitions,polities and confessions which divided rather than healed division. There is deep ironyin our willingness to apply confessional labels too readily to such people.15

Amongst the grand labels that we find perpetually in use to group, classify andretrospectively organize materials, writings and people of the seventeenth century aretwo worn smooth by time and use: 'radical' and 'Puritan'. At one level, Nigel Smith

10 It also seems to me that the assertion that Bunyan is in some sense transferringtraditionalor oral culture to the printed page will not bear the close scrutinythat the former is coming underin the work-in-progressof scholars like David Rollison. Cf. Roger Sharrock,"'When at the firstI took my Pen in hand". Bunyan and the book', in Keeble (ed.), Bunyan,pp. 73, 75, 76." Keeble (ed.), Bunyan, pp. I, III, 17I. Kaufmann's reading of Calvin (and Bunyan) onprovidence should be set against Ronald J. van der Mollen, 'Providence as mystery, providenceas revelation: Puritan and Anglican modifications of John Calvin's Doctrine of Providence',ChurchHistory, XLVII, I (I978), 27-47.

12 Hill, Turbulent, seditious andfactious people, p. 337. Hill is quoting from A confession of myfaith(I672).

13 White, 'Bunyan and Puritanism', in Keeble (ed.), Bunyan,p. 8. White is quoting H. G.Tibbutt (ed.), The minutes of thefirst independent hurch(now Bunyan Meeting) at Bedford, i656-I766,Publications of the BedfordshireHistorical Record Society, xv (Bedford, I976), I7, I9.

14 Cf. Hill's remarks on Bunyan's attitude to Paul Hobson's ecumenicity. Hill, Turbulent,seditious andfactious people, p. 55.

15 Cf.J. C. Davis, 'Cromwell's religionl',in John Morrill (ed.), OliverCromwellforthcoming).It is instructive to note Christopher Hill's comments on the Bedford congregation's apparentpragmatism about its own designationwell into the eighteenth century. Hill, Turbulent,editiousndfactious people, pp. 293-4.


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486 HISTORICAL JOURNALpresents the 'radicals' as so clearly demarcated - if internally diverse - a group thatone can write about matters of their style, their language, their visions and dreams, theirimagery, sources and translations as if they were aspects of a more or less commonexperience.'6 Let it be said that Perfectionproclaimedoffers a better-than-usual treatmentof mid-seventeenth-century radicalism as literature and that Smith's scholarshipenables him to break free of the disciplinary barriers of history and literary criticismwith some assurance. It is a book which is not always accessibly expressed nor easy tofollow but scholars of the field will find it full of stimulating ideas and insights. Inparticular, Part II's treatment of the translations of the Theologicagermanica, SebastianFranck, Hendrik Niclaes and Jacob Boehme, and their impact is the best study we haveof an important and neglected topic. The closer Smith is to a specific text, the morecogent and persuasive is his analysis but there is a tendency throughout to usenumerous and diverse texts as if they were one great, exemplary, 'radical' text. Smithis not alone in this predisposition but one has to ask how legitimate it is when eitherdefinitional constraints on the sample or identifiable links between the originators ofthe texts are lacking. Given the book's concern to track the varieties of linguistic andstylistic conventions deployed by the radicals we might expect the radicals to form adistinct and discrete group for the purposes of literary analysis, but Smith knows thatthis is never entirely so (p. I8). The three 'distinguishing marks' of radical religionwere, he claims with some qualification, the 'rejection of idolatrous "externals", theassertion that the believer is made perfect through the grace of God' and the belief thatthe Holy Spirit could infuse any individual (p. 2). Hardly any protestant would disputethe first, while someone like Bunyan would reject the second and third. Are we, in otherwords, operating with an adequate discriminator, a category with sufficienthomogeneity to make valid general statements about it? In a shrewd footnote onpresbyterians and independents, Smith recognizes that those labels, used too early,simultaneously obscure continuities across the spectrum and mask differences withinthe categories.'7 It does not occur to him to raise the same question with regard to thelabel 'radical', though one might expect someone so sensitive to linguistic conventionsto question a label of such anachronistic imprecision.'8 One sees the problemcompounding in Smith's chosen themes, for example the 'radical' image of the 'self'.This is an important theme and surely worthy of examination, 19 but when the 'radical'contribution boils down to the advocacy of self-denial and the reconstitution of the self,we have to ask how different this is to mainstream protestantismn or indeedChristianity.20 How 'radical' is it? Yet again, Smith finds that 'Ultimately self isrealized in terms of the Bible' (p. 36) and the biblical 'control' on prophecies, visionsand dreams recurs throughout his treatment of these things.2' The problem is that henever demonstrates how this might relate to his concluding invocation of a radical senseof personal authenticity and the linguistic and expressive modes appropriate to this

16 Cf.J. C. Davis, 'Radical lives', PoliticalScience,XXVII,2 (I985), I66-72.17 Smith, Perfection roclaimed, . 7, n. I7. For a recent review of 'distinctions' betweenpresbyteriansand Independents on the issue of religious toleration see Avilu Zakai, 'Religioustoleration and its enemies: the Independent divines and the issue of toleration during the EnglishCivil War,' Albion,xxi, i (I989), 1-33.18 See Conal Condren, in 'Radicals, Conservativesand Moderates in early modern politicalthought: a case of Sandwich Islands syndrome', Historyof PoliticalThought, , 3 (I989), 525-42." James Holstun, A rationalmillennium:uritanutopiasof seventeenthentury nglandand America(New York, I987).20 See Smith, Perfectionproclaimed, h. i, esp. pp. 6I-72, and for self-denial and the

reconstruction of self, p. 66. 21 Ibid. pp. 36, 47, 49, 54, I51, 156, I93, 269.


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488 HISTORICAL JOURNALthrough their speeches, letters, family archives, memoirs and - less legitimately perhaps- through the sermons of clergymen whose views Cliffe takes them to have shared.There is surely enough of a conflict model in operation here to assuage the fears of thosewho see 'revisionism' as sweeping away the prospect of conflict in early-seventeenth-century England. Cliffe's Puritan gentry are, at first glance, a formidable array ofWalzer-type calvinists, a potential revolutionary vanguard. But, of course, they arenot, in any meaningful socio-economic sense of the term, bourgeois. They are part ofthe upper ruling class, the national elite, closer in caste and culture to the Puritanaristocracy than to the middling sort or the merchant entrepreneurs of London orNorwich.

What proportion of that national elite were they? In I642 Cliffe calculates therewere 700 gentry with incomes over JI,ooo a year. Of these he identifies I97 asparliamentarian in early I643 (I 72 in I645) and of those parliamentarians he finds thatI28 were Puritan (I26 in I645). In other words, about a quarter of these substantialgentlemen chose parliament and less than a fifth of them were Puritan.25 From here onin we lose any claim to statistical precision, though quantity and proportion are oftenthe crucial issue. '... most Puritan squires of good estate chose to link their fortunes withParliament, though with varying degrees of commitment' (p. 45). But it is that varietyand its meaning which is politically vital. 'Many' Puritans may have seen religion asthe key issue (p. 6o) but how many is that 'many'? Of the 128 parliamentarian Puritangentry categorized as such by Cliffe for I643, two-thirds never had any militaryinvolvement. 'If many Puritan squires appeared to have little enthusiasm for the causewhich they had pledged themselves to support very few of them defected to the King,though a considerable number were suspected of royalist leanings at one time oranother' (pp. 65, 76). How considerable was that number? What looked like hardcategories of politico-religious allegiance are beginning to blur round the edges.

Puritans in conflictis good on the development of the moderate reform/Root andBranch split which preceded the Civil War. But it is equally good on the politics-by-other-means, sabre-rattling which appeared to be, for many of these well-heeledsubjects of the king, what the early military preparations were all about. As BulstrodeWhitelocke later ruefully recollected, 'it was an unhappy mistake of those who told usin the beginning of our warfare that it would be only to show ourselves in the field andthen all would be presently ended ' (p. 34). It is hard to make warrior-like rebels - letalone revolutionaries - out of many of these representatives of the upper gentry whomwe label Puritan parliamentarian. The fault is not exclusive to Dr Cliffe. It arises fromour predilection for the apparent explanatory force of labels which inevitably run upagainst the complexities, confusions and ambiguities of a world in turmoil and lackingour twentieth-century disposition to organize ourselves into formally knit groups withformulaic identities and manifestos. 'The classification of laymen as Presbyterians orIndependents, whether in a religious or a political sense, is an extremely hazardousundertaking and much of the labelling in modern historical works is highly contentious'(p. 220, n. 38). One has cause to suspect that Cliffe is aware of the equal applicabilityof this admonition to our use of the label 'Puritan', broadly defined as he has it.Throughout this book, as through The Puritan gentry, the full significance of Cliffe'sfindings is masked by the absence of any control groups. How did the attitudes,dispositions and allegiances of this group differ, if at all, from those of the Puritanaristocracy or lesser gentry or the non-Puritan upper gentry? The label persistently

25 of course, the proportionsof the parliamentary gentry who were Puritansare much higher:65 per cent in I643, 73 per cent in I645.


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REVIEW ARTICLES 489suggests more than has yet been proven, that is that there are both common anddistinguishing features of the group so labelled. 'Puritans' must be, in some sense, likeeach other, and, in some sense, unlike non-Puritans. Cliffe's Puritan gentry areundoubtedly godly but how are they different from the godly gentry of contemporaryScotland or France, or those of sixteenth- or eighteenth-century England?Demonstrations of distinctness - of one part of the validity of the label - depends uponcontrast. 6

A starting-point for Dr Cliffe's enquiry is what he considers to be the strangephenomenon of a wealthy elite submitting itself to the rigours of Puritan discipline (p.I 96). One has to recall that one is dealing with a minority within a minority, especiallywhen that group's role in and reaction to the destabilization of the Stuart regime arecanvassed. A crucial question has to be whether the Civil War at its inception was, asBulstrode Whitelocke suggested, a shift in the means by which a continuing politicalstruggle might be waged. Or, was it a more or less conscious strategy to change theterms of the political struggle, from one about the distribution of power within theruling class to one about reform, Root and Branch, reorientating or undermining theestablishment, in other words, one in which ideology is central? It has to be said thatCliffe's upper-class Puritans do not provide a ready answer to this continuingconundrum. Much as men like d'Ewes and Whitelocke could, in I64I-2, see thepossibility of religious reform defusing the political crisis and placating an angryprovidential God, a protestant champion of Prince Henry's ilk did not arise from theashes of Charles I's regal credibility andyet the king acquiredsifficientpolitical and militarysu port to wage war onhis rebellious ubjectsandcomeclose to winning. This resurgence of royalcapacities is still essential to explaining the Civil War and it is not clear that therespectable puritanism of Cliffe's gentlefolk provides the clue to it. Between theapocalyptic, fire-breathing passion of Fast Sermonizing clerics and the hesitancy,prevarication and hedging of the Puritan squires was a gap and into it, as the warstumbled on, flooded disillusion at division, anxiety at growing pluralism, confusionand despair at a breach of loyalty which appeared irreparable. Already in I643, SirGeorge Chudleigh was recalling (p. 77):My lot fell to be cast on the Parliament's side by a strong Opinion I had of the goodnessof theirCause, and the Royal Service I should do his Majesty in defending that his High Court from themanifest Enemies that then to my Judgement appeared against it. Religion and the Subject'slawful Rights seemed in danger and the general Interest called for the common Care to preserveit; but I believe it hath gone too far, the Destruction of a Kingdom cannot be the Way to saveit ... I will contend no more in Word or Deed.For the most part, Cliffe concludes, the experience of war 'helped to fortify the moreconservative instincts of men who had never considered themselves to be in a rebellionagainst the King' (p. 93). If not rebels, then not revolutionaries. The links betweenpuritanism and revolution appear less than automatic.

In the middle of this century it became fashionable, not without cause, to condemndenominational historians for their whiggish views of their chosen denomination andfor their tendency to project denominational labels anachronistically too far back intothe past. Yet, for good or ill, the labels remain and with them some taint of thewhiggishness. What the denominational historians pre-eminently taught us was thatform - ecclesiastical polity, confessional orthodoxy, liturgical integrity - could become

26 Cf. P. G. Lake, 'The impact of early modernprotestantism',Journalof BritishStudies, xviii,3 (I989), 293-304. See also, M. Spufford, 'Puritanism and social control', in Anthony Fletcherand John Stevenson (eds.), Order nddisordern earlymodern ngland Cambridge, I985), 4I-57.


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490 HISTORICAL JOURNALan end in itself. What the marxisant historians, at their best, have taught us is toexplain such forms as social constructs only fully understood in their broader socialcontexts. These are valuable lessons and we must absorb them. But we must also moveon, if only because what denominational and marxist historians have shared is visionthrough the same lens - form.27 The obsession with forms was, however, a minorityobsession, a clerical obsession and, even then, one not shared by all clerics. For mostgodly people in seventeenth-century England the issue was the substance of aprotestant Christianity, the substance of an active, living God who could not beconfined by or reduced to fleshly forms. The preoccupation with forms, denominations,sectarian identities and labels has for too long obscured this essential truth. It is apreoccupation which has obscured a great and rich diversity central to the story ofreligion, politics and society in seventeenth-century England, a diversity which requiresits own modes of contextual explanation.UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA J. C. DAVIS

27 C. H. George celebrating ChristopherHill's Society ndPuritanismnpre-revolutionarynglandas 'the most detailed social historyof the whole body of English Puritans before the Revolution'describesHill's intention in that work as 'to discover all the "non-theological" reasons for beinga Puritan or for supporting Puritans' (C. H. George, 'Christopher Hill: a profile', in Eley andHunt, Reviving, . 21). This seems to me as constructivein the end as searching only for the non-socio-economicreasonsfor being a bourgeois,or only for the,non-socio-politicalreasons for beinga Marxist.

jc davis - puritanism and revolution

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