Blair Worden

In the spring or summer of 1599, the Chorus of Henry V, in Shakespeare’s only explicit reference to a contemporary politician, looked forward to the return of the 33-year-old Earl of Essex from his campaign in Ireland, ‘bringing rebellion broached on his sword’ – a light touch from which some heavy inferences have been drawn. Instead, the Earl returned in disgrace in...

Among the objects of hatred and ridicule in English memory the regime of Oliver Cromwell’s Major-Generals has a towering place. The division of the country, in 1655, into 12 districts administered by killjoy Puritan commanders was a brief episode, in effect lasting less than a year, but it has been reviled and derided from that time to this. In the 18th and 19th centuries, as...

‘We Should Note,’ Francis Bacon enjoined in his Novum Organum, ‘the force, effect, and consequence’ of three inventions which were unknown to the ancients, ‘namely, printing, gunpowder and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world.’ Since Bacon’s time almost everyone has agreed that the social and cultural impact of printing must have been huge. Only in the past half century, however, has it begun to be studied and measured. The movement of enquiry began in France in the 1950s, when the Annales school counted print runs and estimated the breadth and social composition of readerships. More recently, the ‘history of the book’, as it has come to be called, has assumed less statistical, more subtle and more intensive forms.‘

Quentin Skinner’s short book is an extended version of his Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. There cannot have been a less contentious succession to that chair. In his field, the history of political thought, Skinner has earned an authority and distinction unrivalled anywhere in the world among scholars now below retirement age. His writings, above all his studies of the Italian and Humanist political ideas of the Renaissance, his work on Hobbes, and his two-volume Foundations of Modern Political Thought, are landmarks of modern historical interpretation and, in their lucidity and elegance, of historical prose. He has begun his reign by doing what the deliverer of an Inaugural Lecture has a special opportunity to do: raise fundamental questions about the character and purpose of his subject.

To contemporaries, the three Anglo-Dutch naval wars that were fought in the third quarter of the 17th century were epic encounters on which the fate of Europe depended: modern equivalents of Rome’s wars with Carthage or of the Battle of Actium. The size and prowess of the fleets drew astonishment across the continent. So did the thunderous battles, whose scale and drama can still be sensed in the paintings of the Van de Veldes.