Already the daily press has given its contribution towards commemorating this ocasion. A few weeks ago a strange article appeared on the back page of the Evening Post, purporting to vindicate Charles with information newly come to light. Charles R., it seems, died a martyr to the cause of democracy and freedom! What lengths the ruling class of the twentieth century go to, to renounce their own revolutionary past! Hazlitt once scoffed at Sir Walter Scott: "Through some odd process of servile logic, it should seem, that in restoring the claims of the Stuarts by the courtesy or romance, the House of Brunswick are more firmly seated in point of fact . . ." Merely read "bourgeoisie" for "House of Brunswick," and we have the 'present case very aptly summed up. Except, of course, that "the courtesy of romance" no longer suffices. There was a day when we learned that "the Roundheads were Right but Repulsive; and the Cavaliers were Wrong but Wromantlc." Now, apparently, the Cavaliers were both Right and Romantic.

Axe-Grinders

There is, of course, a reason for it. Any admission on the part of those who get the plums of our present order, of the fact that the revolution which first established their supremacy was an unavoidable conflict of class interests, would be the first step to an admission' of the whole of that conception of history which sees class interests as the motivating force in the development of human society. The next logical step would be an admission of the existence of class conflict in our own society and ultimately, of the fact that the future lies with socialism (oh hell. I've said it again).

For the fact is that the Great Rebellion of 1640-1660 was a conflict of class interests. It represented the clash between the feudal aristocracy, the material foundation of whose power (the land) had already been expropriated, and who clung like leeches to the power of the crown; and the rising middle classes of town and country, on whose personal initiative and self-seeking the whole structure of capitalism was to be reared. There is no doubt as to which group was, historically, the more progressive.

Marx and Guizot

Guizot, Orleanist Premier of France, and the most famous historian of the English Revolution, described the two sides thus: "While the higher nobility, flocking to Court to repair their losses, were invested with factitious greatness, as corrupting as precarious, and which, without giving them back their former fortunes, separated them more and more from the people; the gentry, the freeholders, and citizens, solely occupied in improving their lands or commercial capital, were increasing in riches and credit, were becoming daily more closely united, were drawing the entire people under their influence; and, without show, without political design, almost unconsciously to themselves, were taking possession of all the social strength, the true source of power."

In other words, the King and his clique clung to a political power with no social foundation: the bourgeoisie had secured by gradual accretion a social foundation which logically required, and had the power to acquire, political power. Was not conflict inevitable? And was not the middle class the obvious trustee of social progress, and the ill-fated Charles the symbol of social decadence?

Result?

But no. It suits the guardians of the status quo three centuries later to distort the facts in an attempt to prove that the general progress of our constitution has been peaceable, and that such bloody outbursts as 1649 were unfortunate accidents, to be at all cost deplored. Why, heavens above, if we acknowledge the historical correctness of executing Charles the First, who knows but we might not end by having the acknowledge the historical correctness of executing Petkov?

Accordingly the civil strife must be proved to have got us nowhere. The restoration of 1660 took us back, they argue, to 1640. But did it? Historically. 1660 consolidated the gains of the Revolution. It cannot be denied that although some of the political superstructure was later nominally restored, the Revolution did materially advance the progress of the British nation, in liberating the Forces of the middle class from the chains that were stifling their growth. Speaking of the French September massacres, victor Hugo wrote: "Yes the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are ended, this fact is recognised; the human race has been harshly used, but it has moved onward."

It matter not that Hampden. Fairfax and Cromwell may have been thinking of personal rather than public advancement, for historical progress was at that stage bound up with "the personal advancement of individual bourgeois.

A Martyr

But to claim Charles Stuart as a noble martvr for his people is quite ridiculous. Not only was he too, interested entirely in personal aggrandisement, but he was willing to stoop to any low subterfuge to further this end. No history of the period—except the sentimentality of his catamite Clarendon, or the anonymous nonsense of the Eikon Basilike—can conceal this. His character was petty and mean. Certainly, like his ecclesiastical flunkeys Andrews and Laud, he posed as the great humanitarian, defender of the people against the greedy Puritans, but unfortunately, the vice of greed was the epitome of social progress in the seventeenth century. It was only when linked with a backward-looking absolutism, together with such superstitious frills as "divine right," that greed was a vice at all. The demands of social progress prohibit absolute standards.

And certainly the Puritan cause could boast even greater humanitarians than Charles could ever pretend to be What about Hartlib. Winstanley, Lilburne, or the academic Milton?

If ever there was a university graduate who absolutely despised academic aloofness from the passionate currents of his times, it was Milton. Straight from the loins of that rising class "solely occupied in improving their lands or their commercial capital." his attitude to the outbreak of 1640 was predetermined. But at first he remained passive. "I calmly awaited the issue of the contest." he wrote, "which I trusted to the wise conduct of Providence and the courage of the people."

This was always his firm belief—"vox populi. vox Dei." He believed that God had "put the sword into the people's hand," and that since the Parliamentary cause had His benediction, its victory was inevitable. But he never lost sight of the fact that whether or not God's war was won, depended ultimately not on God, but on the people into whose hands the sword was put.

Milton Marched

It was when the crisis broke over the King's suddenly revoking all the Long Parliament's long-awaited reforms, and thus exposing himself in all his stubornness, egotism and deceit, that Milton took the plunge into action. First, oddly enough, he is seen appending his signature to a Citizens' Petition giving moral support to Parliament in the struggle, and heading a demonstration through the streets of London to present it.

He felt that he could not stand aside now, and watch the fight from his ivory tower. If reaction should conquer, he would all his life long "hear within himself stories of discourage and reproach.... Thou hadst the diligence, the parts, the language . . . but when the cause of God and Man was to be pleaded. God listened if He could hear thy voice . . . but thou wert dumb.'" So in he jumped, boots and all.

His first literary assault was on the episcopacy. In attacking the accidents of the religions of feudalism, he was, in reality, attacking the remnants of the dead social system itself; and in putting forth his advanced Presbyterianism the religion of nascent capitalism, he was in reality defending the rising social system itself. From this position he took up one fight after another, finally, in the very year 1649. :n his "Tenure of Kings and Magistrates." by "proving that it is lawful, and hath been held so throughout all ages ... to call to account a tyrant, or wicked king, and after due conviction, to depose him and put him to death." Or, as he put it simply elsewhere. "I only preferred Queen Truth to King Charles."

He scorned the idea of meting out mercy to one who was guilty of holding the whole nation to ransom. "Mercy—to a tyrant—(guilty of) the spilling of more innocent blood by far than ever Nero did . . . (would be) hazarding the welfare of a whole nation, to have saved one, and vilifying the blood of many Jonathans, that saved Israel." The old revolutionary in "Les Miserables" was far more kindly in his judgment on the parallel execution of the infant Louis Louis Dauphin: "You have named [unclear: Louis] XVII. Let us understand each other. Shall we weep for all the innocents, for all martyrs, for all children of the lowest as of the highest rank? I am with you there. But, in that case we must go back beyond '93. and begin our tears before Louis XVII. I will weep over the children of kings with you, provided that you weep with me over the children of the people."

Beside that, Milton was savage. There is a lesson in that, too. The greatest epic poet of England was not too proud to identify himself with a cause "with which all Europe rings from side to side." He even "stooped" to accept the Foreign Secretaryship in a revolutionary government. What price "academic dignity?"

"Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour, England hath need of thee."

—Partisan.