Blair Worden

The front cover and title-page conceal the central fact of Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, that it is a Festschrift for the historian of political thought J.G.A. Pocock. Publishers are generally wary of Festschrifts, which are liable to interest the recipient’s friends and colleagues more than a wider audience; but this is not an ordinary Festschrift. There are no hushed tributes, no rehearsals for obituary notices. By the time he gets a Festschrift, a historian’s ideas are often seen as the product of a generation that has had its day. No one could say that of Pocock’s work, which remains as productive and controversial as ever. The agenda he has set out is far from completion: indeed we may only just be appreciating its measure. The volume concludes with a lengthy commentary by Pocock himself which, in reviewing each of the essays, primarily asks, not how far his earlier positions are vindicated by them, but where we should go next.

In the gentle countryside to the west of Maidstone in Kent lies Penshurst House, the home of the Sidney family since the middle of the 16th century. The most famous of the Sidneys, Sir Philip, included an affectionate account of Penshurst in his Arcadia, where it is thinly disguised as the house of Kalendar. A generation later Ben Jonson’s poem ‘To Penshurst’ celebrated the house as a landmark of antique virtue and antique hospitality, and contrasted it with the new and vulgar ‘prodigy houses’, such as Hatfield and Audley End, that were ‘built to envious show’ amidst the riot of competitive expenditure in the reign of James I. The Sidneys never had the money to spoil their inheritance, which survives as a glorious muddle of a house, centred on an enchanting Medieval hall and sprawling out into its Renaissance and later additions.

For fifteen years Conrad Russell has dominated that most embattled and most heavily populated area of historical study, the origins of the civil wars of mid-17th-century England. In doing so, he has banished controversy to the margins. This is a highly unusual accomplishment. Advances in contentious historiographical territory are generally achieved through baronial feuds, not through submission to a monarchy. Even Geoffrey Elton, who admittedly has dominated a much larger period for a much longer time, from the outset created controversy rather than orthodoxy. Russell has achieved his hegemony by not seeking it. The instinct of historians for confrontation has been disarmed by his intellectual ecumenicalism, by his distaste for entrenched positions, his readiness to modify his findings in the light of fresh evidence or reflection, his generosity to his younger critics: in other words, by his transparent determination to get things right. Those who have heard him lecture – who have witnessed his intensity of intellectual concentration, his unsurpassed mastery of archival evidence, and a memory that reproduces it with the alacrity and accuracy of a photocopying machine – will understand the magnetic authority of his findings. In the last five years or so, it is true, ‘revisionism’, the term popularly given to his position, has begun to go out of fashion –though it is also true, as these books show, that Russell’s own revisionism has been substantially qualified. Yet his critics remain under his spell. If their answers are different from his, their questions and their techniques are the same.’

Can historical biography still be written? Joel Hurstfield, who had planned a life of Robert Cecil, the chief minister inherited by James I from Queen Elizabeth, abandoned it in the 1960s in the belief that the genre had had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him. Biography now belongs to the margins of historical writing. The economic and sociological determinism of the 20th century has questioned the influence of great men, while its psychological determinism has undermined their dignity. To study the past through the lives of its most conspicuous individuals can seem as superficial or as frivolous an exercise as the interpretation of current affairs in terms of the clashes of political personalities. Even if we respect the study of personality we find it hard to practise it when we turn to the Early Modern period, when the evidence more often protects than exposes the private man.

One characteristic of the historical writing of the Eighties was an expanding readiness to relate the politics of the past to its literature: to the literature of ideas and imagination. The social and economic explanations of political behaviour which had been dominant in the previous decades had left too much unexplained. A growing number of historians turned to literature, as to art and religion, to understand the structures of thought and emotion which distinguish one age from another, and without a grasp of which the political language of the past can be unintelligible. More interest is now taken in the culture of a period than in its economics, while the study of high politics seems jejune when it lacks a cultural dimension.