Puritanism and Revolution: Themes, Categories, Methods and Conclusions Reviving the English Revolution: Reflections and Elaborations

on the Work of Christopher Hill by Geoff Eley; William Hunt; A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People: John Bunyan and His Church by Christopher Hill; John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus: Tercentenary Essays by N. H. Keeble; Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660 by Nigel Smith; Puritans in Conflict: Th ... Review by: J. C. Davis The Historical Journal, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Jun., 1991), pp. 479-490 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2639508 . Accessed: 05/10/2012 05:02
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The Historical J7ournal,34,

(I99I),

pp. 479-490

Printedin GreatBritain

PURITANISM CATEGORIES,

AND REVOLUTION: THEMES, METHODS AND CONCLUSIONS

Reviving the English Revolution: Reflectionsand Elaborations on the Work of ChristopherHill.

Edited by Geoff Eley and William Hunt. London: Verso, I988. Pp. viii + 356.
C24.95.

A Turbulent,Seditiousand 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. Nigel Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, I989. Pp. xv+396. ?4?.00.

By

Puritans in Conflict: The Puritan Gentry During and After the Civil Wars. By J. T. Cliffe. London: Routledge, I988. Pp. xi+255. J3o-0oTwo themes and an associated set of questions are evoked by all of these books. The themes, well worn by time and repeated re-examination, are 'Puritanism' and 'Revolution'. The questions relate to the explanatory value, meaning and interrelationship of those themes or categories. In implicit recognition of the agenda set for the historiography of seventeenth-century England by marxist historians and marxisant orientations, they collectively pose the question, 'What can a marxist approach continue to contribute to our understanding of the crises of seventeenth-century England 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. Reviving the English revolutionis in too large measure dedicated to reviving Christopher Hill'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 his normal business, were to be seized by his friends and subjected to all the known techniques of resuscitation. There is a bewildering quality about the reaction, typified by Eley's absurd assertion that Hill's reputation was rather low amongst seventeenthcentury historians in the I970S (the decade of The world turned upside down!). Hill's contribution has never been at a discount (p. 5) among serious students of seventeenthcentury England and, ironically, those who have devoted most time to its critical evaluation may perhaps claim to have attached most weight and seriousness to it.' There is an exaggerated tone of defensiveness, injured righteousness and, on one occasion, retributive violence about some of the contributions to this volume which does less than justice to the historian who has engendered more serious debate about the English revolution in the last fifty years than any other. For Christopher Hill is not only a great historian but a great revisionist historian and, once we recognize that, the
absurdity of our current labelling obsessions - revisionist/anti-revisionist - becomes

transparent.2 He, along with E. P. Thompson

and others, has kept English marxist

History, LXXIV, 241 (I989),

Cf. John Morrill, 'Review article: Christopher Hill's revolution',

243-52. 2 'Revisionism' is, of course, a concept with explosive overtones for the marxist tradition. I use it here in the neutral sense, in which it is accepted by most historians, of a willingness to question
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historiography empirically responsible and thereby capable of engaging in debate with the broad community of English historians. He has kept it thinking, learning, evolving and thereby influential. The revisionist trajectory of Hill's prolific grappling with the English revolution has an 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 our historiography. There has been, as Mary Fulbrook deftly demonstrates, an evolution in Hill's historical sociology which shows him learning from other 'revisionists' and responding with formulations which have moved the debate on. A key feature of this has been his acceptance that the English revolution was not driven by a bourgeois assault upon a feudal aristocracy but arose out of an irreparable split within the ruling class, a split which reflected fundamentally different political, economic and cultural interests. The eruption of lower-class radicalism realigned the ruling-class factions and ultimately created that fatal English combination of repression and liberalism which proved so fertile a ground for bourgeois capitalism. Puritanism and revolution continued to be intertwined but in ways far more complex than the marxist formulations of the I930s, culminating in Hill's own The English revolutionI640, ever allowed. What is distinctive about Hill's revisionism is that it is revisionism within a tradition and it never breaks faith with that tradition. Again, as Fulbrook shows, the continuities in Hill's position have been the acceptance of marxist periodization, the belief that the era of the 'English revolution' was a watershed, a crucible in which English society, culture and politics were transformed; a concern to reconcile a 'deep understanding' (p. 48) of impersonal historical forces with respect for the personal actors of the past; and a political engagement which seeks to recover the 'popular radicalism' of the past, a recovery which is itself a moral activity seen as freeing the present for a wider range of alternatives (pp. 33, 35). His revisionism has operated within the framework of these attitudes and the assumptions underlying them. It is revisionism within a tradition. Perhaps understandably, those who share that tradition show a greater willingness to accept criticism from within its fraternal flow than from without it. - and it is, if one ignores a What is valuable about Reviving the English revolution certain amount of moral outrage and posturing, a valuable collection - is that it illustrates the range of revisionisms which that tradition and Hill's influence as a teacher can generate. It also tells us something about the limitations which that tradition 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 and emphasizing the patriarchalism of the non-Quakers, has to ask whether culture rather than class is the explanation. Lawrence Stone, in a republished essay, suggests that enclosing 'bourgeois' landlords were more likely to be royalist than parliamentarian in the Civil War. Peter Burke questions whether an anti-university radical like William Dell should be related to an 'underground' tradition of Anabaptists, Brownists and the like. Cynthia Herrup, pointing to the fact that those who effectively ran the parishes and counties, and thereby the country, included many more social groups than the gentry and aristocracy, raises the possibility that the 'ruling class' was a socially diverse and complex phenomenon penetrating deep into the hierarchical society of early and, where necessary, discar-dreceived accounts. For some salutary remarkson revisionism/antirevisionismin Stuart historiographysee Glen Burgess, 'On revisionism: an analysis of early Stuart Journal(forthcoming). historiography in the I970s and I98os', Historical

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modern England. What then could a fracturing of that 'class' or a rebellion against it look like? William Hunt, in an essay on the cult of Prince Henry as a focus for the aspirations of a militant, internationalist protestantism and the ramifications of Henry's early death (in I6I2 at the age of i8), argues that, had the Stuarts been able consistently to harness those aspirations, our business would have been explaining the rise of English absolutism rather than the English revolution. Certainly, all of these contributions blur any hard-and-fast distinctions between revisionism and a monolithic orthodoxy. They question some of the basics of the tradition to which Hill has remained faithful. More consistently within that tradition are a group of essays - by Buchanan Sharp, Marcus Rediker and Alan Taylor - which examine attempts on both sides of the Atlantic to enclose, and 'improve' the waste or wilderness, as assaults upon plebeian independence evoking a vigorous resistance. Peter Linebaugh, in a stimulating but necessarily speculative essay, attempts to project these themes on to a grand canvas. Uniting Eric Hobsbawm's view of the general crisis of the seventeenth century as a crisis of imperialism and Hill's The world turned upside down, he evokes a popular intransigence of transatlantic dimensions at the margins of empire and capitalism. All these represent elaborations and extensions firmly within the tradition observed by Hill. Much more surprising are the critical appraisals, tributes of two older hands who in their criticism tend to undermine -the whole structure. David Underdown, recognizing the revisionist quality of much of Hill's work, also explores two limits of that revisionism. One is the insistence on the generally transformative effects of the English revolution. As Underdown suggests, this insistence does little to explain why so much of the old order survived and encourages little appraisal of the implications of those survivals for the concept of an 'English revolution' itself. Secondly, Underdown notes that, while throwing a brilliant spotlight on a radical minority, Hill has left 'the conforming majority still largely in the shadows' (p. 338). Lower-class conservatism - perhaps the popular response of the period - tends to be derogated as the position of those supinely trapped in a deferential order. Hill is 'a moralist, someone who has wanted to write history in large part to encourage us to become better, more complete human beings. ' However one may admire or share sympathy with such an aspiration, one must also recognize that it sets a boundary for the historical agenda. C. H. George describes Hill as 'the most important twentieth-century historian of the world's first bourgeois revolution' (p. I5) and, while emphasizing Hill's anglo-marxist pedigree, provides a valuable account of Hill's evolution - his revisionist trajectory - as an historian. But, in appraising that development, George also opens up deep fissures which undermine the elements of continuity within it. The problem which will not go away is whether any meaning of value can be given to the concept of a 'bourgeois revolution' in a seventeenth-century context. George rightly points out that, in Hill's approach to this, the links of Puritanism, revolution and the bourgeois are critical. However, beyond the formal labelling, George will not accept that there was a Puritan substance. The Puritans4 were not a party, not a movement and did not share a 'mind'. Hill has 'failed to identify the species' (p. 22). George's preference is to push transformative change forward to the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (to abandon Hill's chronology), and to associate such change not with Puritanism but with a secular upper bourgeoisie who, in the person of Sir Robert Walpole, look much like the scions In the mid-seventeenth-century of the traditional landed ruling class (pp. 23-4). pp. 337-9. Cf. the points made by Barry Reay, ibid. pp. 6i-6. Eley and Hunt (eds.), Reviving, Possibly like the Ranters?
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decades, 'which are for Hill, in spite of his knowing better, the Puritan Revolution', the radicals are 'religious crazies', pursuing a 'mad theology' (p. 25, my emphasis). With such appraisal from within the tradition one wonders what possible additional damage Hill's critics from outside of it can do. Let us return to one of the best essays in the collection. In her penetrating examination of Hill's historical sociology, Mary Fulbrook emphasizes the complexity and subtlety of his treatment of the history of ideas. She rightly repudiates Richard Johnson's charges of 'culturalism' but, in doing so, points to some unresolved tensions in Hill's work. While class and culture interrelate, culture does not summarize all there is 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 it but, in evaluating the work of an historian for whom ideas have been so important, this is also where we should begin. There are parameters to the complex interaction amongst variables in Hill's historical sociology. What are they and how are they justified? We fade away from such questions with the observation that ' Hill's particular strength has been richness of illustration and evocation, rather than rigour of theoretical testing' (p. 48). An historian of Hill's superb craftsmanship may hold the balance 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 this approach must cope. In both doctrine and social position - though for different reasons - Bunyan rubs against the parameters of Hill's attempt to sustain interpretative pluralism within a marxisant tradition. The context within which Hill sets Bunyan is one of revolutionary consciousness, popular culture and plebeian unrest. But the enigma which Bunyan then becomes is barely tackled and never related to its implications for Hill's theoretical starting-point. A popular preacher of the least popular of doctrines, double predestination, a soteriology of imputed righteousness, a faith which was the most difficult of all works, Bunyan saw that faith as efficacious only for 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 prisoner for his right to preach, Bunyan remained the most conservative of nonconformists, a passive millennialist who saw princes as the primary instruments of the Second Coming, counselled non-resistance and could honestly deny subversive intentions. 'Bunyan's tactics were from any point of view sensible: non-resistance, adherence to the truth, avoidance of scandal, readiness to co-operate with any state authority which would grant toleration.'5 In this sense, Bunyan should be seen as remaining closer to the Lutheran/Calvinist insistence on subjection to authority of pre-war Puritans (and post-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 have beens " are part of the common stock of the candid Bunyan biographer',6 and Hill does not escape these sociological indeterminacies. Perhaps Bunyan's ancestors had been employees of the nunnery at Elstow. Perhaps Thomas Bunyan (John's great-greatgrandfather) was already a protestant in 1542 (p. 4').- PerhapsJohn didn't see much military service; didn't dislike the army as such. Perhaps he volunteered for service in Ireland, possibly out of boredom or because he hated papists or maybe because he was concerned 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,
6
I50-I,

332, 368-9, 373.

B. R. White, 'The fellowship of believers: Bunyan and Puritanism', in Keeble (ed.), Bunyan, P. 3.

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radical discussion', affect the young Bunyan? 'We can only guess' (p. 52). He may have been a leader of irreverent youths who could be called Ranters, 'for want of a better word', and it may have been their political attitudes rather than their libertinism which attracted him (p. 58). ProbablyBunyan sympathized with the exclusionists (p. 3 I I). His teachings on humility might have embraced anti-deferential attitudes (p. 277). He may have 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 to the millennium' (p. 334). 'There is no evidence to connect Bunyan with any revolutionaries. But it is not easy to be certain exactly where he stood, if he ever had a clearly defined position' (p. 3 I4). In the face of such honesty one has to ask whether, given the natureof the evidence,the most fruitful questions regarding context are being put. The socio-political blandness of the direct evidence and the difficulty of relating the stubbornly conservative Bunyan to the radical contexts Hill evokes certainly pose unresolved problems for the latter's approach. Hill's biography of Bunyan is a story worth telling well told and one in which the dignity of the subject shines through, but it must be judged against the biographer's aspirations, aspirations which are central to Hill's treatment of the history of ideas. The ultimate objective of the biography is to bring Bunyan's ideas into focus against the social and cultural context of his times; 'to rescue him from those who see him as the anatomist of a timeless "human condition"' (p. vii). On the left hand, then, stands the revolution in all its material and cultural force; on the right hand the specific, but elusive, particular contexts in which Bunyan lived, preached and wrote. Hill's depiction of the historical context is thus a story of the English revolution as it might have come home to 'a tinker of Elstow, to a Parliamentarian soldier, to a nonconformist citizen of Bedford' (p. 4). Is there, one wonders, no way in which the real Bunyan might have escaped the fixing of the three right-hand categories or the left-hand metacategory? For the latter, it is now admitted, had little transformative impact on some of the key structural elements of social reality. Reflecting on the power of J.P.s and landlords in the decades after i615, Hill observes, 'Forty-five years and one revolution later not much had changed in this respect' (p. i8). Should one therefore be assessing Bunyan against the absence of serious socio-political change rather than against a background of what amounted to no more than the aspiration for transformative structural change, an aspiration which Bunyan may not even have shared? The Greavesian/Ashcraftian background of continuing radical ferment after the restoration never becomes a totally convincing milieu for Bunyan's shadowy life and it is worth remembering that, as far as we know, he was imprisoned for preaching without a licence, not for what he preached. If the revolt within the revolution of the mid-century, the attempt to turn the world upside down, had at its heart the rejection of the repressive mechanisms of sin and Hell,7 then Bunyan stands outside of it not only in terms of chronology but also of temperament. The burden of sin, the gnawing fear of damnation, the exhausting but never-ending struggle for assurance of a salvation to which sinners can make no contribution, these are the hallmarks of Bunyan's pastoral and literary works. His six tests to know the Cross -justification, mortification, perseverance, self-denial, patience and communion with poor saints- are a pretty traditional, self-repressing lot.8 But whereas, for Hill, in the I640s and sos sin and Hell
7 Christopher Hill, The world turnedupside down: radical ideas during the English revolution (Harmondsworth, I975), ch. 8. 8 The heavenly worksof John Bunyan,ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford, footmanin The miscellaneous

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were means of repressing and internalizing the repression of the lower orders, in postrestoration England they have become well-springs, if not badges, of sedition (p. 316). Such a transmutation is hard to follow and Hill never attempts either to establish its generality or to trace its specific course. It is another loose end in the network of presumed connexions between Bunyan and his social and cultural milieu. When Hill goes in search of the historical Bunyan he does so by setting the daunting challenge of relating his mental world and literary output to the material and social forces of his day. Apart from Roger Sharrock's exploration of the physical production of Bunyan's books, the essays in N. H. Keeble's collection focus not on the relationship between Bunyan's mind and his world but on the relationship between the Bunyan of religious preoccupations and the Bunyan of literary force and reputation, between 'Conventicle and Parnassus'. As an introduction to many of the themes of contemporary Bunyan scholarship it works extremely well. Isabel Rivers in a rewarding essay on Bunyan's reaction to restoration latitudinarianism shows us what he would not have. A religion based on reasonable, natural moral performance promoting present happiness was anathema to one who denied natural human goodness, believed in suffering as virtually an essential part of righteousness and in Christ as saviour, not as exemplar. 'There are two errors in the world about the law, one is, when men think to enter in at the strait gate by the righteousness of the law, the other is, when men think, theymay enterinto heavenwithout the leave of the law. ' It was a difficult balance to maintain, especially in the pastoral concerns of so much of Bunyan's writing but it is one which runs through mainstream pre-war puritanism and mainstream post-war nonconformity. Its source is, of course, ultimately biblical and Keeble's collection provides us with a brilliant series of essays on Bunyan's biblicism. Roger Pooley shows how Bunyan's stylistic eclecticism was legitimated by a concordancedriven sense of the Bible as a single work with many voices. Similarly, John Knott Jr. emphasizes Bunyan's, and his contemporaries', sense of the Bible as a unitary whole to be approached in 'power' and not as dead words. 'Bunyan's real talent lay in adapting biblical materials to the experience of his readers by fusing biblical and colloquial language and creating a narrative that is realistic enough to be entirely credible and yet at the same time uncannily surreal' (p. I65). But we emphasize biblicism only to discover that it is a world of influence rich in ambiguities and problems. Bunyan, as Vincent Newey demonstrates, saw scripture as a ground for the testing of our fallibility. 'Mistakings' were to be expected. There was to be no closure in certitude. A 'confiding uncertainty' might be the proper condition of the believer. Here, as elsewhere, the substance of true religion is to be found in the striving rather than the realizing. So too in reading and interpreting writers like Bunyan we must beware of closure, of the illusion that there is intended to be a final, determinate reading of the text. Valentine Cunningham evokes yet another form of balance in Bunyan's use of one of his centrally informing devices, allegory. As in the Authorised Version, diversity of signification was to be set against fear of the devil sowing misreadings. Text and marginalia were used by Bunyan to subvert closure of interpretation (pp. 236-7). In reading ourselves, Bunyan demanded what Milo Kaufmann calls 'the closest possible scrutiny of the personal will' (p. I 76). Pilgrims must be forever on guard against the devious forms of their own hypocrisy. Faith, never entirely assured, is the only means of bringing some order into the life and circumstances of 'a confused lump, an unclean thing' which is man (p. I85). 9 Rivers, 'Grace, holiness and the pursuit of happiness: Bunyan and restoration latitudinarianism', in Keeble (ed.), Bunyan,p. 68. The quotation is from Tue straitgate (I676).

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These 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 is not, as yet, clear how affixing the labels of a social category that is never going to be uncontentious can sharpen or refine that perception.10 But, equally, it has to be said that the application of denominational or sectarian labels to Bunyan, and so many others like him, darkens rather that illuminates our understanding of the man and his work. The first sign that something is wrong is the perplexing variety of labels which are held to be appropriate. For Sharrock he is a Baptist (p. 78), a designation qualified by Greaves to 'open-membership Baptist' (p. 35). For White he became, was and remained 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 we read Bunyan himself on such labels and the forms they are held to represent the less instructive it becomes to 'fix' him with them. 'As for those titles of Anabaptists, Independents, Presbyterians, or the like, I conclude that they came neither from Jerusalem nor from Antioch, but rather from Hell and Babylon, for they naturally tend to division'.12 As Gordon Wakefield puts it, 'Christ is the way; not any other name or sect' (p. II6). The congregation which Bunyan joined in the early I650s offered Christian fellowship to all who showed faith and holiness of life 'without respect to this or that circumstance or opinion in outward or circumstantial things'. New members were called upon to agree formally and solemnly that 'union with Christ is the foundation of all saintes' communion, and not any ordinances of Christ, or any judgement or opinion about externalls'.13 The eschewing of forms as fleshly and divisive has its paradoxes for any attempt to hold communion with the saints, but we must not underestimate its seriousness and influence after a decade of fratricidal religious conflict and unresolved division. Like most of his contemporaries, Bunyan could not accept that anything less than unity was God's purpose for his children.14 His antiformalism was part of a widespread resistance to an emphasis on names, definitions, polities and confessions which divided rather than healed division. There is deep irony in 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 and retrospectively organize materials, writings and people of the seventeenth century are two 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 transferringtraditional or oral culture to the printed page will not bear the close scrutiny that the former is coming under in the work-in-progressof scholars like David Rollison. Cf. Roger Sharrock, "'When at the first I 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) on providence should be set against Ronald J. van der Mollen, 'Providence as mystery, providence as 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 independentchurch (now Bunyan Meeting) at Bedford, i656-I766, Publications of the BedfordshireHistorical Record Society, xv (Bedford, I 976), I 7, 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.), OliverCromwell (forthcoming). It is instructive to note Christopher Hill's comments on the Bedford congregation's apparent and seditious pragmatism about its own designation well into the eighteenth century. Hill, Turbulent,

factious people, pp. 293-4.

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presents the 'radicals' as so clearly demarcated - if internally diverse - a group that one can write about matters of their style, their language, their visions and dreams, their imagery, sources and translations as if they were aspects of a more or less common experience.'6 Let it be said that Perfectionproclaimedoffers a better-than-usual treatment of mid-seventeenth-century radicalism as literature and that Smith's scholarship enables him to break free of the disciplinary barriers of history and literary criticism with some assurance. It is a book which is not always accessibly expressed nor easy to follow but scholars of the field will find it full of stimulating ideas and insights. In particular, Part II's treatment of the translations of the Theologicagermanica, Sebastian Franck, Hendrik Niclaes and Jacob Boehme, and their impact is the best study we have of an important and neglected topic. The closer Smith is to a specific text, the more cogent and persuasive is his analysis but there is a tendency throughout to use numerous and diverse texts as if they were one great, exemplary, 'radical' text. Smith is not alone in this predisposition but one has to ask how legitimate it is when either definitional constraints on the sample or identifiable links between the originators of the texts are lacking. Given the book's concern to track the varieties of linguistic and stylistic conventions deployed by the radicals we might expect the radicals to form a distinct and discrete group for the purposes of literary analysis, but Smith knows that this is never entirely so (p. I8). The three 'distinguishing marks' of radical religion were, he claims with some qualification, the 'rejection of idolatrous "externals", the assertion that the believer is made perfect through the grace of God' and the belief that the Holy Spirit could infuse any individual (p. 2). Hardly any protestant would dispute the first, while someone like Bunyan would reject the second and third. Are we, in other words, operating with an adequate discriminator, a category with sufficient homogeneity to make valid general statements about it? In a shrewd footnote on presbyterians and independents, Smith recognizes that those labels, used too early, simultaneously obscure continuities across the spectrum and mask differences within the categories.'7 It does not occur to him to raise the same question with regard to the label 'radical', though one might expect someone so sensitive to linguistic conventions to question a label of such anachronistic imprecision.'8 One sees the problem compounding 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 indeed Christianity.20 How 'radical' is it? Yet again, Smith finds that 'Ultimately self is realized in terms of the Bible' (p. 36) and the biblical 'control' on prophecies, visions and dreams recurs throughout his treatment of these things.2' The problem is that he never demonstrates how this might relate to his concluding invocation of a radical sense of personal authenticity and the linguistic and expressive modes appropriate to this Cf. J. C. Davis, 'Radical lives', PoliticalScience, XXVII, 2 (I985), I66-72. p. 7, n. I7. For a recent review of 'distinctions' between Smith, Perfection proclaimed, presbyterians and Independents on the issue of religious toleration see Avilu Zakai, 'Religious toleration and its enemies: the Independent divines and the issue of toleration during the English Civil War,' Albion,xxi, i (I989), 1-33. 18 See Conal Condren, in 'Radicals, Conservatives and Moderates in early modern political thought: a case of Sandwich Islands syndrome', Historyof Political Thought, x, 3 (I989), 525-42. " James Holstun, A rationalmillennium: Puritanutopiasof seventeenth century Englandand America (New York, I987). 20 See Smith, Perfection proclaimed,ch. i, esp. pp. 6I-72, and for self-denial and the
16 17

reconstruction

of self, p. 66.

21

Ibid. pp. 36, 47, 49, 54, I51, 156,

I93,

269.

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(pp. 342, 344). Smith is then repeatedly caught in uncertainties about religious identity and social category. Abiezer Coppe cannot, surely, be taken as the source for the opinion of' most Puritans' on dreams, visions or anything else.22 The social background of the religiously radical runs, Smith claims, the gamut of the middling sort - lower professions, merchants, artisans and yeomanry. Yet the cheapest pamphlets fell within the means of 'poorer labourers' and the religious radicals sanctified popular culture.23 What this means in terms of the readership and influence of Thomas Tany or the translations of Sebastian Franck, Nicholas of Cusa, Hendrik Niclaes and Jacob Boehme is never made clear. Smith's worthwhile study of the translations of continental mystics which were published in the I640s and I65os lacks integration with the book as a whole. Two questions are never tackled with regard to it. What was the relationship between these translations and the general phenomenon of mid-seventeenth-century religious radicalism? How did the influence of these translations on the radicals vary and what may account for the variation? To take one of the translators, John Everard is to reveal the problem. Everard himself never condoned separation (?I582-I640), from the established church. His works 'cannot be said to have had an overwhelming influence on later sectarian writings' (p. I35), and his links with other translators, such as Randall and Brierley, cannot be precisely established (p. I36). The relationship between all of this and the language and literature of mid-century religious radicalism remains elusive. When looking at the influence of Hendrik Niclaes and the translations of his works 'it is hard to show any recurrence of Niclaes's way of writing', and such echoes as there are may have been derived from other sources (pp. I8o-i). Similar problems bedevil the discussion of Jacob Boehme or the imagery of dark and light, as much a feature of Eikon Basilike as of the radicals. The Achilles heel of attempting to sink shafts of stylistic and linguistic interpretation through the 'radical' mass is that the linkages are hard to find and so often Smith has to stress continuity (pp. 3I7, 324) between that mass and the greater society which it seeks to move or to defend itself against. None of this is surprising. The radical endeavour was to persuade others and it may be doubted whether the radicals were quite as eager, as modern literary scholars would sometimes have them be, to develop new stylistic conventions and modes, forms which might be thought appropriate to their radical content. The stress on continuity of form, the 'debt to public and sermon rhetoric' (p. 324) may bring us back to the issue of puritanism and some more direct continuities of substance as well as form. J. T. Cliffe's Puritans in conflict,a study of substantial gentry families of Puritan disposition before, during and after the Civil War is a companion piece to his earlier study of the same group down to i640.24 It cannot be accused of categorical imprecision. Cliffe's group are gentry families worth over /) ,ooo per annum. Their puritanism is identified with calvinist zeal, a stress on precise holiness, personal piety, plain worship with an emphasis on godly preaching. Moreover, Dr Cliffe treats the story of this group with considerable thematic clarity. Their role in the origins of the civil war, their affiliation once that war is in train and their disillusion and fragmentation in the face of the effects of that war are systematically traced
22 Ibid, p. 74, n. 7. Another example is the use of a I689 source for the influence of alchemical Paracelsan and hermetical traditions in the mid-century. Ibid. p. 77. 23 Ibid. pp. I I, 347-8. Compare the claim that women 'made a significant impact upon society from within the radical religious field' (p. I 2) with Phyllis Mack's caution about allowing that any radicals - other than Quakers - even temporarily broke free of patriarchalism. 24 J T. Cliffe, ThePuritan gentry:thegreatPuritan families of earlyStuart England(London, I984).

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through 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 those who see 'revisionism' as sweeping away the prospect of conflict in early-seventeenthcentury England. Cliffe's Puritan gentry are, at first glance, a formidable array of Walzer-type calvinists, a potential revolutionary vanguard. But, of course, they are not, in any meaningful socio-economic sense of the term, bourgeois. They are part of the upper ruling class, the national elite, closer in caste and culture to the Puritan aristocracy than to the middling sort or the merchant entrepreneurs of London or Norwich. What proportion of that national elite were they? In I642 Cliffe calculates there were 700 gentry with incomes over JI,ooo a year. Of these he identifies I97 as parliamentarian in early I 643 (I 72 in I 645) and of those parliamentarians he finds that I28 were Puritan (I26 in I645). In other words, about a quarter of these substantial gentlemen chose parliament and less than a fifth of them were Puritan.25 From here on in we lose any claim to statistical precision, though quantity and proportion are often the crucial issue. '... most Puritan squires of good estate chose to link their fortunes with Parliament, though with varying degrees of commitment' (p. 45). But it is that variety and its meaning which is politically vital. 'Many' Puritans may have seen religion as the key issue (p. 6o) but how many is that 'many'? Of the 128 parliamentarian Puritan gentry categorized as such by Cliffe for I643, two-thirds never had any military involvement. 'If many Puritan squires appeared to have little enthusiasm for the cause which 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 or another' (pp. 65, 76). How considerable was that number? What looked like hard categories of politico-religious allegiance are beginning to blur round the edges. Puritans in conflict is good on the development of the moderate reform/Root and Branch split which preceded the Civil War. But it is equally good on the politics-byother-means, sabre-rattling which appeared to be, for many of these well-heeled subjects of the king, what the early military preparations were all about. As Bulstrode Whitelocke later ruefully recollected, 'it was an unhappy mistake of those who told us in the beginning of our warfare that it would be only to show ourselves in the field and then all would be presently ended ' (p. 34). It is hard to make warrior-like rebels - let alone revolutionaries - out of many of these representatives of the upper gentry whom we label Puritan parliamentarian. The fault is not exclusive to Dr Cliffe. It arises from our predilection for the apparent explanatory force of labels which inevitably run up against the complexities, confusions and ambiguities of a world in turmoil and lacking our twentieth-century disposition to organize ourselves into formally knit groups with formulaic identities and manifestos. 'The classification of laymen as Presbyterians or Independents, whether in a religious or a political sense, is an extremely hazardous undertaking 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 applicability of 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's findings 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 Puritan aristocracy or lesser gentry or the non-Puritan upper gentry? The label persistently
25

of course, the proportions of the parliamentary gentry who were Puritans are much higher:

65 per cent in I643, 73 per cent in I645.

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suggests more than has yet been proven, that is that there are both common and distinguishing features of the group so labelled. 'Puritans' must be, in some sense, like each other, and, in some sense, unlike non-Puritans. Cliffe's Puritan gentry are undoubtedly godly but how are they different from the godly gentry of contemporary England? Scotland or France, or those of sixteenth- or eighteenth-century Demonstrations of distinctness - of one part of the validity of the label - depends upon

contrast.26
A starting-point for Dr Cliffe's enquiry is what he considers to be the strange phenomenon 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, especially when that group's role in and reaction to the destabilization of the Stuart regime are canvassed. A crucial question has to be whether the Civil War at its inception was, as Bulstrode Whitelocke suggested, a shift in the means by which a continuing political struggle might be waged. Or, was it a more or less conscious strategy to change the terms of the political struggle, from one about the distribution of power within the ruling class to one about reform, Root and Branch, reorientating or undermining the establishment, in other words, one in which ideology is central? It has to be said that Cliffe's upper-class Puritans do not provide a ready answer to this continuing conundrum. Much as men like d'Ewes and Whitelocke could, in I64I-2, see the possibility of religious reform defusing the political crisis and placating an angry providential God, a protestant champion of Prince Henry's ilk did not arise from the ashes of Charles I's regal credibility andyet the king acquiredsifficientpolitical and military su port to wage war on his rebellioussubjectsand comeclose to winning. This resurgence of royal capacities is still essential to explaining the Civil War and it is not clear that the respectable puritanism of Cliffe's gentlefolk provides the clue to it. Between the apocalyptic, 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 war stumbled on, flooded disillusion at division, anxiety at growing pluralism, confusion and despair at a breach of loyalty which appeared irreparable. Already in I643, Sir George Chudleigh was recalling (p. 77): My lot fell to be cast on the Parliament's side by a strong Opinion I had of the goodness of their Cause, and the Royal Service I should do his Majesty in defending that his High Court from the manifest Enemies that then to my Judgement appeared against it. Religion and the Subject's lawful Rights seemed in danger and the general Interest called for the common Care to preserve it; but I believe it hath gone too far, the Destruction of a Kingdom cannot be the Way to save it ... I will contend no more in Word or Deed. For the most part, Cliffe concludes, the experience of war 'helped to fortify the more conservative instincts of men who had never considered themselves to be in a rebellion against the King' (p. 93). If not rebels, then not revolutionaries. The links between puritanism and revolution appear less than automatic. In the middle of this century it became fashionable, not without cause, to condemn denominational historians for their whiggish views of their chosen denomination and for their tendency to project denominational labels anachronistically too far back into the past. Yet, for good or ill, the labels remain and with them some taint of the whiggishness. What the denominational historians pre-eminently taught us was that form - ecclesiastical polity, confessional orthodoxy, liturgical integrity - could become
26

Cf. P. G. Lake, 'The impact of early modern protestantism', Journalof BritishStudies, xxviii,

See also, M. Spufford, 'Puritanism and social control', in Anthony Fletcher 3 (I989), 293-304. and disorder in earlymodern and John Stevenson (eds.), Order England(Cambridge, I985), 4I-57.

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an end in itself. What the marxisant historians, at their best, have taught us is to explain such forms as social constructs only fully understood in their broader social contexts. These are valuable lessons and we must absorb them. But we must also move on, if only because what denominational and marxist historians have shared is vision through the same lens - form.27 The obsession with forms was, however, a minority obsession, a clerical obsession and, even then, one not shared by all clerics. For most godly people in seventeenth-century England the issue was the substance of a protestant Christianity, the substance of an active, living God who could not be confined 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 a preoccupation which has obscured a great and rich diversity central to the story of religion, politics and society in seventeenth-century England, a diversity which requires its own modes of contextual explanation.
UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA

J. C.

DAVIS

27 C. H. George celebrating Christopher Hill's Society in pre-revolutionary and Puritanism England as 'the most detailed social history of the whole body of English Puritans before the Revolution' describes Hill's intention in that work as 'to discover all the " non-theological " reasons for being a Puritan or for supporting Puritans' (C. H. George, 'Christopher Hill: a profile', in Eley and p. 21). This seems to me as constructive in the end as searching only for the nonHunt, Reviving, socio-economic reasons for being a bourgeois, or only for the,non-socio-political reasons for being a Marxist.