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Schools’ History Conference June 2019

The Cromwell’s Association’s fifth annual Schools’ Conference took place at the end of June at the National Civil War Centre in Newark. The theme for the day was Revolution. Leading academics of the period debated three subjects in the morning, which was followed by four separate workshop sessions which they led.

Session One (Time: 27:31)

Debated by Professor Hopper and Professor Gaunt, chaired by Dr Fitzgibbons.
How far did Leveller ideology really contribute to a radical change in
policy in either the army or the country at large?  Play

Session Two (Time: 26:05)

Debated by Dr Fitzgibbons and Dr Redmond, chaired by Professor Gaunt.

Given that Charles was called,
'This man against whom the Lord hath witnessed',
was his fate already decided before he was put on trial in
January 1649?  Play

Session Three (Time: 28:11)

Debated by Professor Gaunt and Professor Hopper, chaired by Dr Redmond.

Can we legitimately call the years of the mid-17^th century
a period of revolution?  Play

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The afternoon sessions all looked at contemporary sources and were aimed at developing skills and understanding in analysing and using original material. Each dealt with a different set of sources which are available here together with a brief note from the tutor.

Professor Gaunt

There are no notes or commentary to accompany the documents, but it may be useful to know that as well as looking at specific contents of the documents – so issues of allegience in in the Salusbury letter, the outlook and public views of Charles I and the Earl of Essex, the memories and impressions of Gough, the viewpoints and experiences of Oglander – I tried to get the students to question whether all Civil War documents had the same value and to think about issues which affect reliability veracity value and so on. For example, Charles I’s speech delivered at Shrewsbury was almost certainly taken from a text prepared for him and we have lots of accounts of the fairly stock speech which the king delivered in the opening weeks of the war, while the far more personal and intimate Salusbury letter is a very rare glimpse into the factors and thoughts which lay behind determination of personal allegience; the Gough account is very colourful and feels immediate but we need to remember that he wrote it as an old man near the end of his life in the early eighteenth century and was recalling events which occurred when he was a young child decades before; and we have a number of accounts from contemporary commonplace books of the type kept by Oglander, but the particular value of this source is providing insights into the wartime and post-war conditions on the Isle of Wight (which otherwise is not very well documented).

Download Professor Gaunt’s source documents

Peter Gaunt is professor of early modern history at the University of Chester. He has researched and written widely on the post-war political settlement of the 1650s in general and on the Cromwellian Protectorate in particular. He is the author or editor of fifteen books, including studies of the civil war in Britain and Ireland, in England and Wales and in Wales alone and two (different) biographies of Oliver Cromwell. His most recent publications are The English Civil War: A Military History (I B Tauris, 2014) and new editions of the late Barry Coward’s The Stuart Age (Routledge, 2017) and the late Roger Lockyer’s Tudor and Stuart Britain (Routledge, 2018). He is currently completing a study of the personal experience and surviving first person accounts of the civil war entitled The Metamorphosis of War, to be published by Helion. Currently he is the President and a past chairman of The Cromwell Association.

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Professor Andrew Hopper

Currently Professor Hopper is the lead academic on a major project which is examining Civil War petitions made by former soldiers and war widows to obtain a pension from the state. For full details see www.civilwarpetitions.ac.uk.

The students were divided into 6 groups and they had to appoint a spokesperson to represent their war victim as the most worthy of relief to the teachers (playing the part of the JPs) who had to judge and decide who got the one available pension (chocolate buttons). Transcripts of the six petitions studied are available to view online here.

Andrew Hopper is professor at the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester. After obtaining his doctorate on the extent of support for parliament in Civil-War Yorkshire at the University of York, he completed two postdoctoral fellowships at the Universities of East Anglia and Birmingham before going to Leicester in 2006. He is best known for his two monographs ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007) and Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides in the English Civil Wars (Oxford, 2012). He has published four further edited volumes and fifteen articles in academic journals on civil-war topics. He is currently working on his third monograph Widowhood and Bereavement in the English Civil Wars. He is a patron of the Naseby Battlefield Project, and Academic Director of the National Civil War Centre where he was co-curator with Dr Eric Gruber von Arni of the Battle-Scarred exhibition.

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Dr Jonathan Fitzgibbons

Building on the session in the morning looking at the trial and execution of Charles Ist the session looked three different sources about this subject.

Download the source: The trial and execution of the King (Word .docx)

Jon Fitzgibbons is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Lincoln and a Trustee of the Cromwell Association. His publications include Cromwell’s Head (2008) and Cromwell’s House of Lords (2018). He is particularly interested in the political and constitutional history of 1640s and 1650s Britain, and has written several articles on the regicide and the nature of the English Revolution. He is currently completing a book on the topic of monarchy in Cromwellian Britain and is about to begin a two-year research project, funded by the British Academy, which explores the memoirs of the parliamentarian lawyer Bulstrode Whitelocke.

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Dr Joan Redmond

These sources examine interconnected events: the 1641 Irish Rebellion, and the English Parliament’s invasion of Ireland, led by Oliver Cromwell, in 1649. The Irish rebellion, documented through thousands of witness statements such as that of Elizabeth Price, extracted below, fed English imaginations of the cruelty and violence of Irish Catholics. Stories such as the Portadown massacre that features in Elizabeth’s deposition were in wide circulation in England in 1642, fuelled by many lurid publications, such as James Cranford’s ‘The Teares of Ireland’, which carried the woodcut image on page 2. These and other stories prompted calls for the conquest of Ireland and the elimination of ‘popery’ which had caused so much bloodshed.

The 1649 letter of Oliver Cromwell, detailing the capture of Drogheda, echoes some of these themes in a number of ways. The full letter is very interesting and revealing, but I have put some sections in bold to help with picking out the main details. In particular, historians have highlighted the phrase that the violence of Drogheda was a ‘righteous judgment of God upon these Barbarous wretches who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood’ – this has often been interpreted to mean the blood of the 1641 rebellion, and particularly the Protestants who suffered, such as Elizabeth Price’s family. However, there are competing interpretations, especially since Drogheda was a royalist town, and there was a detachment of English royalists there – could Cromwell have meant royalists in this comment, picking up on the imagery of Charles I as ‘man of blood’ in the lead-up to his trial?

Wider possible questions for discussion include the impact of Ireland on the Wars of the Three Kingdoms; the role of religion, and especially anti-Catholicism, in the conflict; the influence of broader European events, especially the Thirty Years’ War, in the reporting of atrocity; the rules of war in the early modern world, and especially the conduct of sieges, and whether Drogheda was in fact typical of such warfare; the legacy of Cromwell in Ireland.

Download the source: Cromwell and Ireland (Word .docx)

Dr Redmond is a lecturer in Early Modern British History at Kings College, London. She studied at Trinity College Dublin and St Johns College Cambridge. Her PhD research, supervised by Professor John Morrill, addressed religious violence in Ireland between 1641-1660, investigating the phenomenon of sectarian violence and its relationships to religious and ethnic identities in early modern Britain and Ireland. Her publications include ‘Memories of violence and New English identities in early modern Ireland’ in Historical Research, Vol. 89, No. 246 (November 2016), pp. 708-729 and ‘Religious violence and the 1641 Rebellion: divided communities in seventeenth-century Cavan’ in The Undergraduate Journal of Ireland and Northern Ireland, Vol. 3 (2013), pp. 216-228.

The Cromwell Association Study Day 2021

Can we take Cromwell at his word?  Play

In August 2021 Professor Hutton published the first part of a new biography The making of Oliver Cromwell, a fresh look at Cromwell’s early career, and presents him as devious and self-serving. Professor Morrill has a more generous view of Cromwell. The protagonists are long-time friends who deeply respect each other’s work, but the debate brings out their differences of interpretation. Two leading scholars, both with total command of the subject, provide deep and fascinating insights into Cromwell’s complex character.

The debate was chaired by Professor Peter Gaunt (University of Chester), the President of the Association.

Schools’ History Conference 2019 audio lectures…

Debated by Professor Hopper and Professor Gaunt, chaired by Dr Fitzgibbons.
How far did Leveller ideology really contribute
to a radical change in policy in either the army
or the country at large?  Play

Debated by Dr Fitzgibbons and Dr Redmond, chaired by Professor Gaunt.
Given that Charles was called:
'This man against whom the Lord hath witnessed',
was his fate already decided before he was put on
trial in January 1649?  Play

Debated by Professor Gaunt and Professor Hopper, chaired by Dr Redmond.
Can we legitimately call the years of the mid-17^th century
a period of revolution?  Play

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Cromwell: myth and reality
A lecture by Professor John Morrill, December 2018  Play

This lecture was one of a series given in Huntingdon to promote the Cromwell Museum, and was organised jointly by the Museum and the Friends organisation, by whose kind permission, along with that of Professor Morrill, it is published here. The speaker challenges a number of widely held opinions about Cromwell and effectively dismisses them as myths. Professor Morrill is a Vice-President of the Association and is currently working on a comprehensive revised edition of Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, which he refers to at the beginning of his lecture. The sound is not broadcast quality but the content makes it worth listening to.

Dr Morrill’s PowerPoint presentation, to accompany this lecture, can be downloaded here.

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The following debates were held at The Cromwell Association’s Schools’ History Conference at St Paul’s School, London on 27th June 2018.

Professor Peter Gaunt and Dr David Smith, chaired by Professor Jason Peacey, debate,
In terms of the main civil war of 1642-46, did parliament win because
of superior resources (broadly defined) or did the royalists lose it
because of operational blunders?  Play

Dr Joan Redmond and Professor Jason Peacey, chaired by Dr David Smith, debate,
When and why did the parliamentarians commit to regicide?
Was Charles I or Cromwell more responsible for the
king's execution?  Play

Professor Peter Gaunt and Professor Jason Peacey, chaired by Dr Joan Redmond, debate,
Was the main civil war of 1642-46 a national war and a national
campaign waged throughout England and Wales, or is it better seen
as a series of interlocking regional and county wars?  Play

Speakers

Professor Peter Gaunt

Peter Gaunt is professor of early modern history at the University of Chester. He has researched and written widely on the civil wars of the 1640s and on the post-war political settlement of the 1650s in general and on the Cromwellian Protectorate in particular. He is the author or editor of fourteen books, including studies of the civil war in Britain and Ireland, in England and Wales and in Wales alone and two (different) biographies of Oliver Cromwell. His most recent publications are The English Civil War: A Military History (I B Tauris, 2014) and a new edition of the late Barry Coward’s The Stuart Age (Routledge, 2017). He is currently working on a new edition of the late Roger Lockyer’s Tudor and Stuart Britain and on a study of the personal experience and surviving first person accounts of the civil war entitled The Metamorphosis of War, to be published by Routledge and Helion respectively. Currently president and a past chairman of The Cromwell Association, Peter lives in north Cheshire.

Professor Jason Peacey

Jason Peacey is Professor of Early Modern British History at UCL. He edited The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (2001) and The Print Culture of Parliament, 1600-1800 (2007), and co-edited Parliament at Work (2002), and is the author of Politicians and Pamphleteers. Propaganda in the Civil Wars and Interregnum (2004), and Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (2013). Recent articles include ‘Print culture, state formation, and an Anglo-Scottish public, 1640-1648’, Journal of British Studies (2017) and ‘Print, publicity and popularity: the projecting of Sir Balthazar Gerbier, 1640-1662’, Journal of British Studies (2012). He is currently working on a project relating to overlapping and interlocking publics in seventeenth century Europe, as well as on a micro-history relating to the politics and religion of a long-running legal feud in seventeenth century Gloucestershire.

Dr David Smith

Dr David L Smith is Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His books include Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c. 1640-1649 (1994), A History of the Modern British Isles, 1603-1707: The Double Crown (1998), The Stuart Parliaments, 1603-1689 (1999), and (with Patrick Little) Parliament and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (2007). He is a former Trustee of the Cromwell Association.

Dr Joan Redmond

Dr Redmond is a lecturer in Early Modern British History at Kings College, London. She studied at Trinity College Dublin and St Johns College Cambridge. Her PhD research, supervised by Professor John Morrill, addressed religious violence in Ireland between 1641-1660, investigating the phenomenon of sectarian violence and its relationships to religious and ethnic identities in early modern Britain and Ireland. Her publications include ‘Memories of violence and New English identities in early modern Ireland’ in Historical Research, Vol. 89, No. 246 (November 2016), pp. 708-729 and ‘Religious violence and the 1641 Rebellion: divided communities in seventeenth-century Cavan’ in The Undergraduate Journal of Ireland and Northern Ireland, Vol. 3 (2013), pp. 216-228.

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The following debates were held at The Cromwell Association’s Teachers Day at St Anne’s College, Oxford on 27 June 2017.

Professor Ronald Hutton and Professor Edward Vallance debate, chaired by Professor Ann Hughes.
Did Cromwell become Lord Protector in 1653 in order to return
England to political stability?  Play

Professor Ann Hughes and Professor Ronald Hutton debate, chaired by Dr Elaine Murphy.
Many modern historians consider Cromwell’s religious views
to be sincere, so why did several contemporaries consider
him a hypocrite?  Play

Dr Elaine Murphy and Professor Edward Vallance debate, chaired by Professor Ann Hughes.
In the light of events in Ireland, can Cromwell be said
to be a war criminal?  Play

Speakers

Professor Ronald Hutton

Ronald Hutton is Professor of History in the University of Bristol and Associate Dean of its Faculty of Arts, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Antiquaries, the Learned Society of Wales, and the British Academy. He is the historian on the board of trustees which runs English Heritage, and chair of the Blue Plaques panel which awards commemorative plaques to historic buildings. He has published fifteen books and seventy-five essays on a wide range of subjects including British history between 1400 and 1700, ancient and modern paganism in Britain, the British ritual year, and Siberian shamanism.

Dr Elaine Murphy

Dr Elaine Murphy is a Lecturer in Maritime History at the University of Plymouth. Her research focuses on naval history in the 17th century with a focus on the period of the Civil Wars. Elaine’s new research examines the role of women and the navy in the 17th century. She has previously worked on the 1641 Depositions Project in Trinity College Dublin and the New Edition of Oliver Cromwell’s Writings and Speeches Project at the University of Cambridge. She is a co-editor of Volume II of this new edition which covers the period from 1649 to 1653 and includes Cromwell’s campaigns in Ireland and Scotland. Her publications include Ireland and the War at Sea, 1641-1653 (2012), The 1641 Depositions and the Irish Rebellion (edited collection, 2012). She is the co-author of a forthcoming book on the navy during the 1640s entitled The British Civil Wars at Sea (Boydell and Brewer. November 2017 with Richard Blakemore).

Professor Edward Vallance

Edward (Ted) Vallance is Professor of early modern British political culture at the University of Roehampton and has previously taught at the universities of Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool. He is the author of A Radical History of Britain (Little, Brown and Co, 2009), The Glorious Revolution (Little, Brown and Co., 2006) and Revolutionary England and the National Covenant (Boydell, 2005). With Harald Braun he has edited two volumes on conscience and casuistry in early modern Europe: Contexts of Conscience (Palgrave, 2004) and The Renaissance Conscience (Wiley Blackwell, 2011). His articles have featured in Albion, English Historical Review, Historical Journal, Historical Research, History Workshop Journal, The Huntington Library Quarterly, Journal of British Studies, Renaissance Studies, and The Seventeenth Century. Aside from academic journals, he has also written for the Guardian, History Today, Literary Review, New Statesman, Al Jazeera (Eng.), BBC History Magazine, and Teaching History, and contributed to documentaries on British, Dutch and French television and radio. He is currently completing a monograph on loyalty and the emergence of a political public – working title Cromwell’s Trunks – to be published by Manchester University Press.

Professor Ann Hughes

Ann Hughes has recently retired from Keele University, where she was Professor of Early Modern History for almost twenty years. Her research focuses on the religious and political implications of the revolutionary crisis in mid-seventeenth century Britain, with particular recent interests in print culture and modes of communication, in preaching and in gender. She is the author many essays and articles, and of four books: Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire (Cambridge University Press, 1987); The Causes of the English Civil War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd edition, 1998); Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2004), and Gender and the English Revolution (Routledge, 2011), and co-edited, with Thomas Corns and David Loewenstein, The Complete Works of the radical visionary, Gerrard Winstanley (Oxford University Press, 2009). She is currently working on parliamentarian preaching in the 1640s, supported by a Leverhulme Trust Emeritus Fellowship.

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The following debates were held at The Cromwell Association’s Teachers Day at Newnham College, Cambridge on 28 June 2016.

Dr David Smith and Professor Jason Peacey debate, chaired by Dr Patrick Little.
Did parliament win the civil war or did the royalists lose it?  Play

Professor Jason Peacey and Dr Laura Stewart debate, chaired by Dr David Smith.
To what extent was parliament more to blame than Charles I
for the failure of settlement 1646-9?  Play

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The following lectures were given to The Cromwell Association’s Study Day at The City Temple, London on 3 October 2015.

Professor John Morrill, Vice-President of the Associatiom
Welcome and introduction  Play

Dr Elliott Vernon, London
Oliver Cromwell, Presbyterians and Presbyterianism  Play

Anne Hughes, Emeritus Professor, University of Keele
The public profession of the nation: religious liberty and the
English church under Oliver Cromwell  Play

Dr Kate Peters, University of Cambridge
The Quakers and the politics of the army, 1647-59  Play

Dr John Halcombe, University of East Anglia
Cromwell, Independency and Public Reputation  Play

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The following three lectures were given to The Cromwell Association’s Teacher’s Day at Selwyn College, Cambridge on 30 June 2015.

Professor Ronald Hutton and Professor John Morrill debate. Chaired by Dr Patrick Little.
Cromwell and Military Dictatorship: to what extent did the
government of the Protectorate rest solely on bayonets?  Play

Professor John Morrill and Dr Patrick Little debate. Chaired by Dr David Smith.
Cromwell and the Crown: what does Cromwell's eventual rejection
of the Crown tell us about his motives and aspirations?  Play

Dr David Smith and Professor Ronald Hutton debate. Chaired by Dr Patrick Little.
1658-60: was Richard Cromwell's failure inevitable given the tensions
following his father's death?  Play

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We are grateful to the Princes Trust for the following three lectures from eminent historians, Jason Peacey, David Smith and Peter Gaunt.

(PDF to accompany lecture)
Healing and settling in Cromwellian England; the view from the
bookshop  Play

Dr David Smith of Cambridge University,
Oliver Cromwell and the People of God  Play

Professor Peter Gaunt, University of Chester,
Secular sources of Oliver Cromwell's power during the 1650s  Play

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The late, great Barry Coward,
Was the Protectorate a military dictatorship?  Play

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Professor John Morrill,
The religious context of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland  Play

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Debate chaired by Dr David Smith between Dr.Micheal O Siochru (Trinity College Dublin) and
Dr Jason Peacey (University College London) to the Cromwell Association 19 October,
Drogheda and Wexford: what did happen?  Play

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Professor Peter Gaunt, University of Chester
Cromwell's contribution to Parliament's military
victories 1642-1651  Play

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Doctor David Applepby, University of Nottingham
Cromwell's whelps and rebels, disbanding the Old Army  Play

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The following audio lectures can be found on The Historical Association website.

• Dr Jason Peacey, UCL, The Trial of Charles I
• Professor Peter Gaunt, Chair of the Cromwell Association, Oliver Cromwell
• Professor Peter Gaunt, The Commonwealth, Protectorate and Radicalism