The Green Ribbon Books

Hell or Connaught: The Cromwellian Colonisation of Ireland 1652-1660

Peter Berresford Ellis
Hamish Hamilton 1975
Blackstaff Press 1988

 

The Cromwellian plantation of Ireland is an event that still resonates to this day, and in Beresford Ellis it has a worthy chronicler. His highly readable account of the period shows a mastery of original sources, both native and settler.

Beresford Ellis draws on English political pamphlets of the 1640s to argue that the Levellers opposed the invasion. Yet it was in many cases the most radical parliamentarians who ended up in Ireland, perhaps as part of a deliberate policy to keep them from making trouble in England. Some such as Edmund Ludlow, would themselves become exiles following the restoration of Charles II.

The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

Christopher Hill
Penguin
1972

Magisterial study of the left-wing of radical puritanism in England during the Civil War and the Commonwealth.

Hill describes a period of intellectual and social ferment that gave rise to a huge range of radical sects, Levellers and True Levellers, Ranters, Diggers and Quakers, and which left its mark on great writers like John Bunyan and John Milton.

For Hill, these ideas represent the germ of a deeper social upheaval, 'the world turned upside down' within what ultimately became a bourgeois revolution.

This Marxist reading has been subject to much criticism from later scholars, but this book remains a classic study of an inspirational period in English radical history.

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A Deeper Silence: The Hidden Origins of the United Irishmen

A.T.Q. Stewart
Faber & Faber
1993

This book traces the influence of English and Scottish radicalism on the United Irishmen.

Stewart describes two important parallel developments in Eighteenth Century Ireland which ultimately came together in the United Irish movement.

The first was the emergence of an Irish national consciousness amongst Protestants who had formed the political class ever since the Williamite settlement of the late Seventeenth Century. Imbued with the Whig principles of the English revolutions of the 1640s and 1680s, they increasingly chafed at the Irish Parliament's subordination to England.

The second was the gradual re-emergence of a Catholic middle class able to challenge the penal laws.

These twin developments are clearly summarised in chapter three, The Story of the Injured Lady.

The Tyrannicide Brief

The Story of the man who sent Charles I to the scaffold
Geoffrey Robertson
Chatto & Windus
2005

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The Tryannicide Brief explores the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649, and the life-story of John Cooke, the lawyer who prosecuted the King and paid for it a decade later with his own life.

The death of Charles I has often been seen as nothing more than a settling of scores at the end of the English Civil War. Robertson argues that it was in fact a blow for human rights, establishing the principle that the head of state is not above the law.

Free-Born John

The biography of John Lilburne
Pauline Gregg
Phoenix Press
1961

The definitive biography of a neglected but decisive figure in English history, the Leveller leader John Lilburne.

Gregg's account focuses on the Levellers' fight for legal and political rights for ordinary people, a story which has many parallels with struggles for human rights around the world today.

Lilburne's repeated confrontations with authority were pivotal for the development of English common law. Gregg shows how he used propaganda and mass organisation in a way which made him arguably the first modern political activist, and the Levellers the first modern political movement.  The book is particularly good on the network of underground printing presses which sustained the Puritan opposition to Charles I.

Required reading for anyone who wants to understand the human struggle underneath the costume drama of the English Civil War.

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The English Levellers

The English Levellers
Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought
Edited by Andrew Sharp
Cambridge University Press
Cambridge 1998

A selection of key texts from the Levellers, the radical democratic movement which emerged on the Parliamentary side of the English Civil War in the late 1640s.

Includes the Levellers revolutionary blueprint for an English constitution, the Agreement of the People, and a report of the Putney debates, a classic confrontation  between the rights of the majority and the rights of the propertied few, as well as writings by key Leveller thinkers such as John Lilburne, William Walwyn, and Richard Overton.

The volume also includes a useful introduction, bibliography, chronological table and biographical notes.

An Online version of the texts is available at constitution.org

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