John Bossy

Everybody knows that Abelard was a philosopher, the lover of Heloise, and castrated in consequence: a romantic figure, like say Tchaikovsky, in an age of epics. Michael Clanchy’s life of him is too serious to count as romance, and too witty to be epic. He writes extremely well, and matches with a wide and happy learning, which runs from Socrates to Eliot and from Cole Porter to Eco, his intense engagement with the mind and heart of Western Christendom in the 12th century, a time which always seems particularly springlike. His engagement is no less with the authors who have already written about Abelard, 76 of whom are cited briskly in his preface; but he does not bang on about it. He is telling a story; his mode, to borrow a phrase from Peter Burke, is thick narrative.

In the spring of 1604, the English were adjusting to the arrival of King James from Scotland, attending to the doings of his first Parliament, and awaiting the arrival of envoys from the King of Spain to negotiate an end to twenty years of war. Peace, even with the Scots, was in the air. This did not please everybody, and some of the people it did not please were Catholics, who thought that the Spaniards had let them down by failing to make formal toleration for them a condition of the peace. They also had a grudge against James, who was supposed, before his accession, to have promised to remove their disabilities, and was now, they thought, about to put the Elizabethan code against them back into force.

Do we need narrative history? Yes, because otherwise we shall live on clichés about it, like the French. Do we need a narrative history of England? Yes, for the same reason, and because otherwise we shall think that the past is an allegory of the present and be suckers for propaganda for good or bad causes, environmental, constitutional, criminological, Euromushy, feminist. Do we need multi-volume histories of England? Yes, probably, because there is a limit of compression below which narrative history cannot do its duty. Do we need them to be produced by one firm of publishers? Doubtful: volumes will be better or worse, and are most unlikely to amount collectively to the seamless web Lord Acton dreamed about for the Cambridge Modern History. So, do we need a New Oxford History of England? The old one, got off the ground with great promptitude by G.N. Clark in the Thirties, held up by the war, and finished with A.J.P. Taylor’s extra volume on 1914-45, does not much ring in the mind, except for its first two volumes (Collingwood and Myres, and Stenton) and Taylor’s. I doubt if the new one will fare any better. John Roberts, the general editor, does not show his hand in detail, and we must keep our fingers crossed about the whole being greater than the parts by giving ‘an account of the development of our country in time’ – ‘our country’ meaning something different for King Alfred and Queen Victoria, but ‘the state structure built round the English monarchy’ being the core of it.’’

There must be an ecumenical spirit at work at Yale University Press for, having just given us Eamon Duffy’s masterly and devoted evocation of English Christianity before the Reformation, The Stripping of the Altars, they have now made things even with David Daniell’s William Tyndale. Tyndale’s life is soon told. He was born, probably in 1494, of a landowning and entrepreneurial family in that part of Gloucestershire where the Cotswolds meet the Severn, since then the home of Evelyn Waugh (temporarily: the ghost of Tyndale got the better of him), of a bird sanctuary and a power station. Then it was most famous for the cloth trade, which gave Tyndale plenty of support during his life. He went to Oxford, where he discovered Erasmus, and perhaps to Cambridge as well. Around 1523 he left Gloucestershire for London, and tried to persuade the learned Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, to let him translate Erasmus’s New Testament into English. When Tunstall turned him down, he went abroad to the Netherlands and Germany, where he published his translation, now of a Lutheran stamp, in 1526.

Francis Bacon has had a variety of reputations, which have tended to go up and down in a random or independent sort of way. At the moment he is generally regarded as a master of English rhetoric, an unsuccessful reformer of natural philosophy, and a cold fish. Julian Martin has tried to put him together, not by a lumping biography, but by finding the crux. His title is clumsy, but he is a good read, has an excellent point to make, and makes it successfully. His line is that it has been impossible to get at the inwardness of Bacon because of the radical division between writers who are interested in the history of science or philosophy, in Jacobean politics, and in the advancement of English prose. His method of dealing with this is to engineer a restoration of proper categories, where ‘science’ is not distinguished from ‘polities’, or indeed from the ‘arts’, if the construction of aphorisms is to be regarded as an art.