Martin Kettle (Don’t mention the civil war – the English are still fighting it, 25 January) combines questionable generalisations – kings, queens and battles “still dominate the way [history] is taught” and counsels of unattainable perfection: women, Scots, black people, protest, kings, queens and class conflict should all “be part of a fully rounded 21st-century historical awareness”.
Yet, Kettle contradictorily asserts, “England and Britain need a new shared vision of their history” – which leads us straight back to myopic mythology (and, in Kettle’s words, “endless movies about Churchill [and] the second world war”).
You can’t have it both ways: either history is a critical discipline (“historiography”), seeking to understand the past, warts and all, or it is myth, premised on distortion and amnesia.
Myth may have its uses – for example, when it comes to fighting wars or winning referendums – but it is not critical history/historiography. And the latter is also contested and divisive: recall that Cromwell, whose revered bust – wart and all? – sits on Kettle’s mantelpiece, harshly repressed the Levellers and Diggers.
Alan Knight
Emeritus professor of history, Oxford University
• Martin Kettle’s thoughtful article about the civil war opines that there will be no flowers left to commemorate Cromwell this week. That’s true. The Cromwell Association marks the anniversary of his death on 3 September by laying a wreath, when possible by the Thorneycroft statue at Westminster.
Our aim is to increase understanding of Cromwell and the 17th century, not through acts of reverence, but by encouraging research, stimulating debate and publication of the outcomes.
John Goldsmith
Chairman, the Cromwell Association
• The contention that a “popular modern monarchy and the end of the death penalty have combined to leave Charles I as the posthumous moral victor of the conflict he lost” is groundless. Firstly, a “modern monarchy” bears no resemblance to Charles’s conception of the institution – he being wedded to an absolutism in which parliament’s claims to its own rights and privileges were to be denied absolutely. Charles’s personal rule of 1629-40 and the attempted arrest of the five members in 1642 – parliament having been reluctantly recalled by Charles because the royal coffers were empty – attest to his convictions and his intent. Secondly, the “end of the death penalty” as evidence of Charles’s superior morality is not merely bewildering, but an irrelevance since this was never an issue that divided Charles and parliament.
Robert Lawrence
Oxford
• The English civil war wasn’t about puritan people objecting to the licentiousness of the aristocracy. The roundheads were in favour of religious freedom rather than having a set of values imposed on them by wealthy people who think the normal rules of society do not apply to them (like some members of the Presidents Club?).
Through the restoration of the monarchy, the same elite regained the power and privilege, and the people who wanted to follow their own religious beliefs without enforcing them on others were suppressed.
Michael Peel
Axbridge, Somerset
• Martin Kettle’s article reminded me of an experience I had while planning the inspection of a primary school in East Anglia. During my preliminary visit, I was told the school was an amalgamation of two village schools, one of which had closed owing to falling numbers. The school I was due to inspect was retained and, as might be expected, there had been a great deal of ill feeling between the villages, which was still evident – particularly, I was told, because they were on opposite sides in the civil war.
Mel Bradshaw
Southampton
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