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“... In a recent TV programme about King George VI, Peregrine Worsthorne commended his late sovereign for being a dull man, brains being the last thing the British constitution requires of a monarch. It was not always so. Whatever else has been said about the first Elizabeth (one recalls Sheridan’s ‘no scandal about Queen Elizabeth I hope?’) no one has ever complimented her on being dull ...”

“... From the Fifties to the Seventies, historians of early modern Europe were tempted to search for general regularities with which to order the past, if not quite to explain it. Examples are the notion of a ‘general crisis’ in the 17th century, and the ‘rise’ of the gentry and an alleged ‘crisis’ of the nobility, especially in England. Seismic shirts in European civilisation, functional and dysfunctional, part of the breakdown of the medieval world and the coming of modernity, were discussed in reductionist terms as the consequence of the so-called ‘military revolution’, or of the fiscal burden of parasitical royal courts, or as incidental to the phenomenon of the multiple kingdoms which were another feature of the age ...”

“... The crisis, the most severe to hit the regime since it had come into office, began in Lincolnshire. Columns of smoke rose above the English countryside. At one point the nation’s leader was tempted to take personal charge of the management of the crisis. But when the Lincolnshire problem proved to be shortlived, he unwisely wound the preventative operation down, persuading himself that the crisis was under control, even over ...”

“... It is said that when representatives of the Society of Friends came to Buckingham Palace in 1945 to present a loyal address at the end of World War Two, the king asked who these people were. ‘Some call them Quakers, Your Majesty.’ ‘Oh,’ the king said. ‘I didn’t know that there were any of them left.’ According to the protocols of sociologists of religion, the Quakers are a sect, rather than a denomination, and perhaps after three centuries there shouldn’t have been any left ...”

“... In a court in western Kenya, on 13 July 1934, Major Geoffrey Selwyn and his wife, Helen, were jointly charged with the murder of a ‘native’. Geoffrey Selwyn, my father-in-law, died before the trial began. Proceedings continued in his absence, and my children’s grandmother was found guilty of manslaughter and sent to prison. The trial attracted much attention at the time, and when Helen Selwyn was sentenced it made the front page of some British newspapers ...”

“... into anthropological jargon, and the broader significance of bonfires and bells remains imprecise. Patrick Collinson is also concerned with the impact of Protestantism. Not long ago, the dominant view was that in the later 16th century England became a Protestant country, but in recent years this has been vigorously challenged. ...”

“... shoulders. There are virtues in the anti-Laudian interpretation, too, for a historian like Patrick Collinson, who approaches the 1630s not backward from the Civil War but forward from the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. Collinson observes the success of pre-Laudian Puritanism in working within the Church, sees ...”

“... beginning with John Foxe and William Camden in her own time, and extending across the centuries to Patrick Collinson and David Starkey in our own, have examined Elizabeth’s reign from a variety of angles, analysing its various subtle strategies and compromises, attempting to evaluate what it achieved. Dobson and Watson, by contrast, are concerned less ...”

“... in the Church. So far as I can see, this is what historians like Christopher Hill and Patrick Collinson feel he ought to have said, rather than what he actually did say: indeed, like Hooker, he expressly exonerated the Puritans from preaching voluntaryism. And even if he had said it, Martin’s conclusion would still be unjustified: ‘Bacon ...”

“... The publication of Patrick Collinson’s The Religion of Protestants is a stirring event in the rediscovery of Early Modern England. Unmistakably the work of a historian who has reflected on his subject for the better part of a working lifetime, the book consists of six wide-ranging essays which were originally delivered as the Ford Lectures when Professor Collinson visited Oxford in 1979, and which have now been revised, expanded and tightened – although the speculative tone of the lecture-hall has been appropriately retained ...”

“... from the US and twice from Canada.) He continued to get married. He constructed what the historian Patrick Collinson admired as a ‘magnificent library’ out of books he hadn’t paid for. He regularly plagiarised. He wrote a bad book (one academic disbelieved the rumour that it had been written by Peters’s fourth wife because ‘it would, I think, be ...”

“... for it. Alastair Duke on the Netherlands, Henry Cohn on Germany, Robert Evans on Eastern Europe, Patrick Collinson on England are all as alive to the limits as to the extent of Calvin’s influence on churches which drew eclectically from a range of Protestant and Humanist thought both native and foreign, and which were more likely to think of ...”

“... but also with a sense that these alien terms were threatening the Gaelic which embedded them. Patrick Collinson has complained (LRB, 3 April) about ‘the lack of relations’ between historians and literary critics working on Elizabethan England. Just as Early Modern historians of the ‘British and Irish problem’ need to think more intently about ...”

“... describe the feelings of English people in America a century earlier.The point is surely that, as Patrick Collinson argued in a famous essay about the Elizabethan ‘monarchical republic’ (absent from Suranyi’s bibliography), it was possible to have expectations of one’s superiors, defend oneself by law and custom, and feel like a citizen – as in ...”

“... predestinarians’ and ‘credal predestinarians’) are those whom we used to call Calvinists. Patrick Collinson in his admirable Archbishop Grindal† recently reminded us that Beza was ‘a Calvinist in a sense that Calvin himself never was’. We still usefully employ the word ‘Marxist’, even though Marx himself denied being one. But the ...”