Introduction

Now is surely the most exciting time to work on the English Revolution for a generation.

Thirty years ago, historians passionately debated the class antagonism of the English Civil War. They charted, as Christopher Hill did in The World Turned Upside Down, the amazing variety of democratic, utopian and even sexually radical ideas that flowered in the 1640s.¹ The English Revolution, as it was known, generated some of the most exciting historical work in the English language. But a decade later, many historians were claiming that the ideas of the sects never had widespread appeal, while others went so far as to deny that some of the sects ever existed. They began to talk of the Civil War, not the Revolution. Seventeenth-century England was a society held together by bonds of loyalty and deference, it was argued, not one riven by class antagonism. And in the longer process of the development of the English state, the Revolution began to be seen as merely an insignificant interlude, a disturbance brought about by a series of short-term political crises that derived from the fact that Charles dealt with three kingdoms at once (England, Ireland, Scotland). It was emphatically not the revelation of an underlying conflict over the nature of rule itself.

This was never an absolute consensus; and recent work has pushed the boundaries of debate still further.² David Cressy has recently argued that there was a revolution in 1641; David Como has traced the origins of radical religious thought back before the 1640s; John Walter has returned popular political and religious protest to a central place in the revolution.³ Meanwhile new studies by historians such as Steve Hindle and Andy Wood have shown just how class power was made real in day-to-day interactions over the poor law and enclosure – and how ordinary people resisted.⁴ And at last some of the questions raised by historians of gender have found echoes in the literature on the Revolution: was citizenship understood as male? did the Revolution affect relations between men and women? if the King was the ultimate patriarch, how was the household affected when England was no longer ruled by a King?

We asked four historians for their views on the English Revolution now. The diversity of their responses suggests just how many of the old certainties are being called into question. Quentin Skinner analyses the role of the idea of liberty in the English Revolution. He tackles an assumption of the recent literature head on, for he claims that the Revolution was ideological, and that at stake were two different political theories. Skinner examines the language of slavery and freedom to show that what people were arguing about was not the loss of particular rights or liberties: they were concerned with the status of the whole nation as free or as in bondage. Once we have grasped this, he argues, we can see why it was that so many of the Levellers and their opponents at Putney thought that only those who were not subject to the will of another should be able to vote.

John Walter here fleshes out the meaning of such citizenship for the political nation. Returning popular politics to the English Revolution, he links popular radicalism to the long tradition of dissent evident in, for example, the enclosure riots that began long before the Revolution and continued long after it. Local politics, once marginalized from the revolutions of the 1640s, turn out to be central: in law courts and parish churches, matters of national import were contested, and through cheap, uncensored print, crowd actions, and petitions, debates became multivocal. Not just the magistrates, but the people, were duty-bound to participate. In that participation, women found a new place for political expression; and as Skinner shows, it is becoming evident that the much-used definition of citizenship, liber homo, did not necessarily exclude women.

For Rachel Weil and Ann Hughes, the relationship between individual and state is where some of the most fascinating action of the revolutionary period takes place. Weil's concern is the question of allegiance, an issue of...