Revolutionary England, c.1630-c.1660

Essays for Clive Holmes

George Southcombe, Grant Tapsell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317063391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Revolutionary England, c. 1630–c. 1660 presents a series of cutting-edge studies by established and rising authorities in the field, providing a powerful discourse on the events, crises and changes that electrified mid-seventeenth-century England.

The descent into civil war, killing of a king, creation of a republic, fits of military government, written constitutions, dominance of Oliver Cromwell, abolition of a state church, eruption into major European conflicts, conquest of Scotland and Ireland, and efflorescence of powerfully articulated political thinking dazzled, bewildered or appalled contemporaries, and has fascinated scholars ever since. Compiled in honour of one of the most respected scholars of early modern England, Clive Holmes, this volume considers themes that both reflect Clive's own concerns and stand at the centre of current approaches to seventeenth-century studies: the relations between language, ideas, and political actors; the limitations of central government; and the powerful role of religious belief in public affairs.

Centred chronologically on Clive Holmes' seventeenth-century heartland, this is a focused volume of essays produced by leading scholars inspired by his scholarship and teaching. Investigative and analytical, it is valuable reading for all scholars of England's revolutionary period.

1 Clive Holmes and the historiography of early modern England

The quiet revolution

George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell

Clive Holmes, it has been noted on more than one occasion, asks clever questions.¹ He also asks a lot of questions. At conferences and in seminars, Clive is always among the first to interrogate the paper-giver. At the conference held in his honour, from which this collection of essays grew, he was a key participant. He has never, however, fallen into the modern academic vice of asking questions that are thinly disguised exercises in self-promotion. As many will attest, this does not necessarily mean that answering Clive’s questions – acute, probing, pertinent – is a comfortable experience. Clive is himself a fluent and engaging speaker. His papers and lectures are driven by argument and, while carefully prepared, are developed orally in interaction with his audience. If he does not quite engage in the passionate extemporizing of Oliver Cromwell, his style is closer to the Lord Protector’s than to the dryasdust, solemn, scripted performances that can characterize academic discourse. There is therefore ostensibly little that is quiet about Clive Holmes.

Clive as a historian, however, has not been given to making grand, iconoclastic statements. As many intelligent young men and women, let loose as graduates in the county archives in the late 1960s and early 1970s, started to invert the propositions on which the Whig historical interpretation of the seventeenth century had been based and to forge a new and vigorous ‘revisionist’ picture, Clive remained, in most respects, unmoved. The article for which he perhaps remains best known, ‘The County Community in Stuart Historiography’, launched a powerful attack on accounts that stressed the localist and particularist mentalities of the seventeenth-century political nation and provided the basis for an account in which national concerns and ideological conflict could continue to play a role in explaining the outbreak of the civil war. His later article on early Stuart parliaments, directly contrasting with the influential account provided by Conrad Russell, identified the different ideological understandings – particularly surrounding the property rights of the subject – displayed by MPs and the crown that had the potential to combust in the volatile context provided by the rule of Charles I. More recently, an implicit critique of the new British history has been offered in his resolutely Anglo-centric Why Was Charles I Executed?, the first chapter of which offers a tour de force of argument tracing the reasons for the collapse of Charles I’s government back to Tudor processes of state development. Finally, he has resoundingly restated older accounts of the trial of Charles I, just when undergraduate essays were succumbing en masse to fashionable siren voices.² In all of these important contributions to the debates, part of Clive’s work has been to remind his readers of the potency of some older accounts. In this way he has effected a quiet revolution in the historiography in a sense that was still common in the seventeenth century. He has returned the debates to something like their starting position. Lawrence Stone once called Clive and himself ‘the last of the Whig historians’. It is a label Clive has accepted with some pride. One index of his success, and it is one to which he likes to point, is the tendency of others to claim that they have agreed with him all along.³

It is a mistake, however, simply to stress the ways in which Clive has challenged what he sees as unnecessary innovation. Both of Clive’s first two monographs did much more than critique previous writings. The Eastern Association in the English Civil War displaced misguided religious or socio-economic explanations for the unique success of that body with one that captures ‘the complex and tension-ridden dialogue’ between three layers of political action: the national, the regional, and the local.⁴ Seventeenth-Century Lincolnshire displayed a powerful awareness of the key intellectual currents in the writing of empirically grounded local history, notably evolving understandings of ‘community’. Nevertheless, it was written in two parts – ‘structure’ and ‘narrative’ – with the specific intention of marrying sensitivity to local circumstances with a sense of the shaping force of national developments. Here a particular focus was kept on the lawyers, clerics, and gentry who acted as ‘“brokers”, channelling the products of the national culture into the localities’.⁵ This emphasis on brokers points in microcosm to what has perhaps been the energizing conceptual force behind Clive’s most constructive contributions to historiography: the emphasis on dialogue. One of the most fruitful outcomes of this has been his reconstruction of the role played by those below the level of the gentry in shaping political developments, and his demonstration of the depth of their political acumen and understanding.⁶

Clive’s work has therefore been wide-ranging, powerfully argued, and professedly unfashionable. How are these scholarly predilections to be explained? Here it is necessary to examine the interplay between Clive’s role as a tutor and the different geographical contexts in which he has played that role and in which his intellect was forged.

For Clive, it is axiomatic that teaching is the bedrock of intellectual life, and it is in his teaching that many of his modes of working can be seen to have developed. Clive’s students – whether they knew it or not – were inoculated against current fashions at an early age by an insistent emphasis on what was good, rather than on what was merely hot off the press. Incisive historiographical judgments and the phrases used to articulate them were honed in teaching and repeated in print or at scholarly gatherings. ‘The paladins of modern revisionism’ received short shrift from him.⁷ Indeed, revisionists were almost invariably ‘soi disant’, though that was at least preferable to being ‘anaemic’. A.G. Dickens was described in tutorials during the 1990s as a much more insightful historian than most of the angry young men who had built careers trashing his oeuvre. Christopher Hill captured the ‘passion’ of the period with greater acuity than any other historian. Lawrence Stone was praised at a symposium in 2008 for his imaginative use of legal records when most participants were taking it in turns to shoot Stone’s corpse. Conrad Russell was ‘simply brilliant’, but nevertheless often wrong.⁸ Others were just wrong. Students had to think for themselves rather than following superficially authoritative voices. And time and again this was all brought back to the handling of evidence. When Clive wrote of another scholar’s ‘selective and insufficiently critical reading of the sources’, he was again committing to print something of the credo he always articulated whilst teaching.⁹

The forensic criticism of modern scholarship that was foundational to many of his publications was thus forged through teaching, but so, more importantly, was his constructive contribution. As one eminent reviewer sagely noted of a book co-authored with Felicity Heal, ‘Its clarity and consistent good sense represent powerful arguments for the complementary disciplines of teaching and research to remain fully integrated in the historical profession’.¹⁰ Weekly essays, or draft chapters of theses, would always feature encouraging written comments, or gentle suggestions for reshaping, before substantive criticism, primarily intended to sharpen the argumentative points at issue or else to add lustre to the prose in which those found expression. The necessity of entering into a dialogue with a new generation of undergraduates each year, however much they were dependent on his learning, also meant that he never stopped engaging afresh with big questions (even if he did not find many of the new answers to them compelling).

The process of revisiting big questions through teaching helps explain why he has at key points in his career focused upon them. Explaining quite why Clive is so good at addressing these big questions is not so easy. He has never been associated with a particular intellectual school possessing a readily identifiable scholarly toolkit. Nor has he confined himself to a single, manageable sphere of enquiry. Quite the reverse. The variety of Clive’s interests are, perhaps, inherently intellectually fruitful; they have provided him with multiple perspectives, points of comparison, and a deep distrust of sectional or professional special pleading. This is most obvious in his writings on legal history. Few would have the confidence to criticise the pre-eminent modern historian of English law for offering a ‘largely internalist’ reading of legal change, one indicative of the extent to which he has ‘internalized’ the ‘professional complacency’ of early modern legal writers.¹¹ Sheer intellectual breadth has led Clive to invoke fourteenth-century legal examples when investigating statutory interpretation in the seventeenth century, and to quote Julian Pitt-Rivers’ discussion of honour when writing about the later Stuart gentry.¹² Few historians would have thought to deploy Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire whilst discussing early modern Lincolnshire, or Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro whilst evoking a clerical vendetta during the 1630s.¹³ All who have been taught by Clive can testify to his enviable capacity to cite biblical texts, a useful legacy of a Calvinist upbringing.

Nevertheless, to ascribe Clive’s scholarly achievements to a fine brain and wide reading deployed as a tutor will not quite do. The sharpness of his work also reflects the extent to which he has been influenced by different academic environments. Although he was a student at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and benefitted from the panoramic vision of the great medievalist Philip Grierson, Clive was particularly inspired outside his college by the intellectually liberating tutorial example of the classicist Sir Moses Finley. Having Sir Jack Plumb as a doctoral supervisor placed a premium on intellectual self-reliance, and also further embedded a concern with clarity of argument and expression. But it was the experience of two decades of teaching at Cornell University in upstate New York that proved decisive in several ways. At one level, it was thanks to an unusually fine collection of early modern witchcraft pamphlets that Clive first began to develop what would become one of his core scholarly interests.¹⁴ More profoundly, teaching big survey courses, and developing the skills to inspire vast lecture audiences, bred confidence within a previously rather uncertain personality. Cornell was the making of Clive, a fact witnessed not least by his receipt of that university’s Clark Distinguished Teaching Award. Robert Ashton need not have been ‘a trifle puzzled by the prevalence of spelling [in The Eastern Association] which would suggest Cambridge, Mass. rather than Cambridge, England’: Clive might be taken out of America, but the positive experience of America has never been taken out of Clive.¹⁵ Much as he has enriched scholarly life in Oxford, and contributed to the workings of both Lady Margaret Hall and the History Faculty, Clive retains an intellectual eclecticism and cosmopolitan outlook that reflects the importance of working for a quarter of a century in other places.

I

What makes Clive such an extraordinary teacher? According to many rather ‘mechanical’ modern benchmarks, Clive would struggle to pass muster: his written comments on essays are not usually voluminous; he rarely provides students with detailed reading lists; relatively little emphasis is placed on exams. Clive’s pithy critiques of the work of modern historians, and his suspicion of the latest interpretations, mean that he does not waste much time in detailed discussion of historiography, and may spend the majority of a tutorial discussing in detail what actually happened in, as it may be, the English parliaments of the 1620s, or the machinery of Tudor government, or colonial American administration. This would be a recipe for disaster, or at least tedium, in other, lesser hands. Yet the lived experience of Clive’s undergraduate tutorials and classes is thrilling. Clive’s theatrical inclinations are given full rein, and rather than a dull recounting of events students are thrust into the turmoil of the past. ‘You’ve got to be there. You’ve got to feel it’, he shouts at classes of jaded Oxford finalists.

A key element in his performance is simply one of physical posture: Clive invariably sits poised on the front edge of an armchair, leaning forwards, exuding energy and engagement. Banal student comments tend to be instantly rephrased, significantly deepened, complimented, and then turned into a powerful question initiating the next round of discussion. If Clive’s precarious position on the edge of his seat remains a dominant visual signal of tutorial intent, the sound of his teaching is invariably accompanied with laughter. Warmth and good humour are critical in encouraging students: risks can be taken because they are never punished, never subjected to ridicule. (Clive’s deepest disdain – verging on loathing – has always been reserved for intellectual bullies.) That this intense sense of optimism is so successfully manufactured is all the more remarkable since Clive is, in fact, a self-confessed ‘congenital pessimist’.¹⁶ Students are made to feel that History is something they can do themselves. ‘I suspect your reading of Shakespeare would be considerably more subtle than Professor X’s’ might with the benefit of hindsight appear a double-edged compliment to write in the margin of a tutorial essay, but it proved intensely liberating when laid before a nineteen-year-old. ‘Be bold!’ has always been his advice before exams.

Clive’s career as a graduate supervisor gathered speed after his return to England. He has since 1988 seen thirteen doctoral students through to the completion of their theses, and he has supervised on a wide variety of subjects (from Restoration Great Yarmouth through colonial Virginia to Socinianism and the Cromwellian ‘Other House’). It is easy for his students to develop a kind of heretical understanding of him, as he demonstrates in supervisions an apparent omniscience (though this impression is perhaps helped by the fact that most supervisions are viewed through an alcoholic haze over lunch). In both conversation and in written commentary on work, he corrects erroneous understandings of legal history, obscure biblical passages, and, perhaps more surprisingly, poetic scansion. His aim is always to allow others to develop their own voices and arguments. This can sometimes have the disconcerting effect of his then announcing – months after he has approvingly discussed a piece of work – ‘of course, I’ve always thought you were wrong about that’, but in fact his own char...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Clive Holmes and the historiography of early modern England: The quiet revolution
• 2 Policy enforcement during the Personal Rule of Charles I: The Perfect Militia, Book of Orders, and Ship Money
• 3 Party politics in the Long Parliament, 1640–8
• 4 Henry Ireton and the limits of radicalism, 1647–9
• 5 ‘Parliament’, ‘liberty’, ‘taxation’, and ‘property’: The civil war of words in the 1640s
• 6 A trader of knowledge and government: Richard Houncell and the politics of enterprise, 1648–51
• 7 The uses of intelligence: The case of Lord Craven, 1650–60
• 9 England’s ‘atheisticall generation’: Orthodoxy and unbelief in the revolutionary period
• 10 Thomas Ady and the politics of scepticism in Cromwellian England
• 11 The demand for a free parliament, 1659–60
• 12 The revolution of memory: The monuments of Westminster Abbey
• 13 ‘A pair of Garters’: Heralds and heraldry at the Restoration
• 14 Remembering regicides in America, 1660–1800
• Bibliography of the writings of Clive Holmes, 1967—2016
• Index