A debate without end
Richard 01lard
ROUNDHEAD REPUTATIONS: THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR AND THE PASSIONS OF POSTERITY by Blair Worden Penguin Press, f20, pp. 387, ISBN 071399603X Everything Blair Worden writes is so lucid and judicious that his readers have long been on tenterhooks to see him engage directly with Oliver Cromwell, who was neither. The confrontation of opposites is often fruitful for biography.
In the present work the historiography of the Protector is the unifying theme. How deep and how sympathetic the author's own understanding of the subject is may be glimpsed in one telling sentence:
Had Ludlow hut known it, the accusations of sinfulness and apostasy that he and other saints would heap upon Cromwell after his break with them weighed on the Protector's heart with a heaviness beyond endurance.
To some contemporaries it seemed, as one wittily put it, that 'Cromwell will weep, howl and repent even while he doth smite you under the fifth rib'. But that is by no means all that there is to be said on the subject. Simple explanations, whether favourable or unfavourable, do not get one very far. Too often, as this book brilliantly shows, the political correctitude of one age was imposed on a predecessor that would vigorously have rejected it.
Roughly the book has three centres of interpretation, comprehending the interpretation of the interpreters themselves: the Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, the writings of Algernon Sidney and the titanic figure of Thomas Carlyle, oddly described on p. 340 as 'essayist and novelist'. One trembles at the thought of those novels: Catherine Morland, by then a buxom beldame, would no doubt still have found them 'all horrid'.
Ludlow's Memoirs, which the great historian Sir Charles Firth took as a major fundamental source in the Cromwellian period. are, as the author fascinatingly demonstrated some 20 years ago, a masterpiece of fabrication. Ludlow, who emerges from them as a rational, sceptical, leftwing Whig avant la lettre, was in fact a narrow-minded, passionate religious bigot with little or no interest in the secular constitutionalism he was there made to profess. The original document from which the Memoirs were concocted, A Voyce from the Watch Tower, happily, if anachronistically, suggests that his true affinities were with the Jehovah's Witnesses of our own day. The sheer impudence, the unblushing dishonesty of the concealed author, John Toland, are somehow exhilarating. But although Professor Worden is profuse in his admiration for the superb scholarship of Firth and of his mentor S. R. Gardiner, the story is a salutary exemplification of Pieter Geyl's dictum that history is a debate without end.
Algernon Sidney, a now all but forgotten figure, towered over the anti-Tory, antiroyalist view of the civil war taken in the 18th century on both sides of the Atlantic. A much more cultivated, more intelligent man than Ludlow, he was a practised and prolific writer. But to demonstrate his impact on the age that followed him it is necessary to quote a number of authors whose oblivion is perhaps better deserved. In this connection it seems strange that the noble epitaph on the royalist Arthur Capel is credited to the Biogmphia Btitannica whereas it is lifted, word for word, from Clarendon.
Professor Worden, unlike most of the men of whom he here writes, is both fair and candid. He is also, as his treatment of Carlyle shows, generous. He lays special emphasis on the warmth of his heart, while acknowledging his violence and irrationality. To most of us it is hard to decide which is the more repulsive, his mentality or his language. His affinities with Hitler or the Taleban seem so obvious, his torturing of a language he could write perfectly well when he chose the worst sort of pulpit exhibitionism. What Carlyle hates is innocent enjoyment, people sitting under their own vine Id their own fig tree. He can't resist herding them into battles or houses of correction. Yet we have abundant testimony to the wit and charm of his company and conversation. It is a great gain that Professor Worden can discern his hidden qualities, unhesitatingly crowning him as the supreme interpreter of Cromwell, since his own biography should offer us Carlyle's insights without their attendant disgusts.
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