The New History of England

7/29/2019 The New History of England

1/8

TheNew Historyof EnglandCHRISTOPHERHILL

Oxford University

OF SERIES of histories of England there appears to be no end. Wehave the OxfordHistory of England, the Penguin History of England,Nelson's and Longman's Histories-and I am sure many more. Butpublishers seem to think the market inexhaustible.The appearance ofthe first two volumes of a new series, Harvard'sThe New History ofEngland, gives occasion for considering the genre, and asking whatobjectives the new series has and how they differ from those of itspredecessors.Any set of textbooks on English history aimed at last-year school-boys and girls and at first-yearuniversity students should have twoaims at least. It must give a basic minimum of information; and itshould try to interest and excite its readers. It is no good stimulatingby scintillating generalizations unsupportedby facts; it is even worseto churn out the well-worn narrative of events if the imagination ofthe youthful reader is not caught.Tojudge by the first two volumes, Reform and Reformation:En-gland, 1509-1558 by G. R. Elton and Stability and Strife: England,1714-1760 by W. A. Speck, the New History of England leans to theside of sobriety. These books deal with relatively short periods ofCHRISTOPHERHILL,master of Balliol College, OxfordUniversity, is the author ofReformation to Industrial Revolution: The Making of ModernEnglish Society, 1530-1780 and numerous other monographsand textbooks.Professor Hill's essay is reprintedwith permissionfrom The New YorkReview ofBooks,.April 6, 1978.Copyright @ 1978 Nyrev, Inc.

87


2/8

88 THE HISTORY TEACHERhistory, and that perhaps in itself restricts the possibility of epigramsringing down the centuries. Political narrative predominates. Thepresentation makes few concessions-no illustrations,no diagrams,nomaps. The dedication of the reader to the subject is assumed. Thepublishers no doubt know what the market will bear.

In academic respects, the two authors are well chosen. ProfessorElton has a secure place among the top half-dozen or so English his-torians. Dr. Speck is a younger man with a growing scholarly reputa-tion. Both of them are "safe" and rather old-fashioned in theirapproach to history. Professor Elton is on record as disapproving ofmany modern fashions in historiography-sociological, anthropologi-cal, psychological;he is not much of a quantifier.Real history for himis political, constitutional, and administrative history. Its proper sub-ject is the government rather than the people of a country. Dr. Speckmakes more concessions to moderntrends,but his main interest is alsoin political history. The two editors of the series are ProfessorNormanGash and Professor A. G. Dickens. So far the series seems to leantoward the approach of the former rather than of the latter.

ProfessorElton has transformedour understandingof a decade ofEnglish history and this decade-the 1530's-is arguably among thethree or four most important in the history of the country. ProfessorElton has achieved his effects by unrivaled mastery of the archivematerial for the period on which he has concentrated. From his firstpublished work he has remained true to the conviction that theninspired him-that Thomas Cromwell is a great and previously ma-ligned figurewhose consummate statecraft broughtabout administra-tive reforms that changedthe nature of the English monarchyand thedirection of English history. With the years, and with acceptance,Professor Elton's statement of his thesis has matured. He thumps thetable less; he no longer insists on describing what happened in the1530's as a revolution, though he has not revised his estimate of itssignificance. The original claim that the 1530's saw the foundation ofa state which lasted until the nineteenth century has also been tacitlydropped;as Professor Elton informed himself better about the seven-teenth century, he would notice much of ThomasCromwell'sadminis-trative machinery being abolished. This volume represents a muchmore balancedincorporationof The TudorRevolution in Governmentinto what other historians are prepared to accept.But when all qualifications have been made, Professor Elton'sachievement is very great. Thirty years ago historians saw ThomasCromwell as a buccaneering and very unpleasant adventurer in poli-tics, the self-seeking and unprincipled henchman of Henry VIII. He


3/8

NEW HISTORYOF ENGLAND 89now appears as a constructive statesman, much abler and more far-sighted than Henry VIII; in a brief but whirlwind career Cromwellreconstructed much of the machinery of state, converted his sover-eign, hitherto a conspicuously loyal son of the church, to an alliancewith Parliament against the Papacy, and did as much as any one manto ensure the victory of Protestantism in England.

This last is perhapsthe most surprisingreversal in Thomas Crom-well's reputation. The man who used to be thought a Machiavellian,and who certainly recanted his heresies in the vain hope of saving hislife, was nevertheless a man who at the height of his power ran consid-erable politicalrisks to make sure that the Biblein English translationwas published and circulated in England. No doubthe did not foreseethe effects of his action over the next 120years, as godly laymen of allclasses pored over the Scriptures and argued about their meaninguntil finally some of them found in the Bible a justificationof regicide.But if English men and women have been the people of the Book,Thomas Cromwell(together perhaps with ArchbishopCranmer)musttake much of the credit for it.One should add, too, another of Professor Elton's virtues: his ca-

pacity for writing clear, vigorous, trenchant English.He may shock orannoy his readers, but he never bores them. Professor Elton's convic-tion of the importanceof what he is saying, and his desire to persuade,comes across in everything he writes. It is a rare and enviable gift.Professor Elton then was the obvious man to write the secondvolume of the New History of England.He had previously covered thewhole sixteenth century in a textbook called England Under the Tu-dors. Here he concentrates on the half century which he has madepeculiarly his own.It gives him the opportunityfor a maturer, mellow-er reconsiderationof his principalthemes. His terminus in 1558makesit unnecessary for him this time to depict the reign of Elizabeth as asort of appendage in which the administrative principles of ThomasCromwell were worked out.

One possible criticism would be that the word"reform" n Profes-sor Elton's title (replacing the original "revolution" of The TudorRevolution in Government) is never precisely defined. Yet reformmust mean reform of something for some purpose: it implies a pro-gram. In Professor Elton's usage the word includes constitutional andadministrative reform as well as religious reform;sometimes it comesperilously near to meaning anything which Thomas Cromwell did inthe interests of centralization;and this is assumed without argumentto be desirable. I expect it was, but the point needs arguing.There seems to me to be a contradictionbetween Professor Elton's


4/8

90 THE HISTORYTEACHERpraise of ThomasCromwell as a great Parliamentarian,the creator ofconstitutional monarchy, and the point quietly made in a footnote onpage 281:"Thegrowingtension between unitary centralization(Crom-well's ambition) and the power of local people and groupings was tobe temporarily tided over by the use of aristocratic lords lieutenant;but this compromisedid not prevent the civil war, and I suspect thatCromwell would have thought it inadequate." The reference is toProfessor Youings's suggestion that "Cromwell's all saved the realmfrom being covered with a network of bureaucratic institutions."Bureaucratic centralism might have prevented the civil war of theseventeenth century, but only by "controllinglocal government,"i.e.,by controlling from the center those gentlemen and merchants whoran local government and whom the House of Commonsrepresented.If we look at Continentalanalogies, this would have necessitated notonly a bureaucracybut also a standing army to coercethose who paidthe taxes. I do not think Professor Elton has solved the apparentcontradictionbetween his praise of Cromwell as a centralizer and hispraise of him as a minister anxious to rule through Parliament. Thecontradiction was resolved, as he indicates, in the civil war; afterwhich the executive organs of Cromwell'sstate were dismantled, andgentry rule of the localities was set free from effective interferencefrom Whitehall.

Professor Elton sees the characters in his period as divided intotwo categories--Thomas Cromwell and the goodies who supported oragreed with him on the one hand, and the baddies who thwarted ordisagreed with him, or who failed to continue his policy after hisdeath, on the other. Onthis majordivision he has never wavered, andit leads him to some agreeable historical revisions. Henry VIII, forinstance, is demotedfrom the pedestal on to which Pollard and othersraised him, and is depictedas an arbitrary,treacherousman, not veryclever and not very industrious. Sir Thomas Moreis rescued from thehagiographers (whether Catholic or utopian);his persecution of here-tics is restored to the prominence which it enjoyed in the eyes of hiscontemporaries, including himself. Cardinal Wolsey occupies an am-bivalent position. In some of his earlier writings Professor Elton con-trasted Wolsey's achievements with those of Cromwell ("the lastmedieval chancellor was followed by the first modern secretary ofstate");but now that Elton'sviews of Cromwellhave by and large beenaccepted he can be more generous to the Cardinal under whomThomas Cromwell served his apprenticeship.Professor Elton is impa-tient with those who sentimentalize over Bloody Mary. "Humanismhad passed her by as much as had protestantism," he accurately if


5/8

NEW HISTORYOF ENGLAND 91unkindly sums up. Finally, the commonpeople have never been favor-ites of Professor Elton's. Some of them accepted that it was theirdestiny to be ruled; others sometimes allowed themselves to be in-fluenced by "trouble-makers."The latter are among the villains ofProfessor Elton's black and white scenario.

Some of the defects of Professor Elton's qualities come out inconsequence of the more limited period with which he deals in thisvolume. Believing that political and administrative history is the onlyserious subject, he makes no concessions to readers who have widerinterests. Magic, astrology, and medicine do not appear in his index,though most Englishmenalmost certainly took the first two as serious-ly as they took Christianity, and this is one of the crucial periods inthe history of English medicine. Lineacre and Sir Thomas Wyatt re-ceive one brief mention each. The Earl of Surrey, discussed severaltimes as general and conspirator, gets one line as a poet. There is agood deal on Tyndale,but nothing on the place of his (orSimon Fish'sor Latimer's)writing in the evolution of English prose. The new craftof printing is mentioned, but there is no attempt to assess its impor-tance in the formationof publicopinion. Largeclaimshave been madeabout that importancewith which ProfessorEltonmay not agree;buta discussion of them would have been helpful to students.Nor does his bibliography assist them much; literature, music,and art are not among the twelve subjects covered. The old traditionof the OxfordHistory of England, in which chapters about literatureor art were stuck on at the end of an otherwise politicalnarrative, hadmuch to discommend it; but even this was better than virtual totalomission. Professor Elton's book is after all subtitled "England,1509-1558"; iterature and art, medicine and music, were part of the lives

of Englishmen.How people lived is indeed another conspicuousomission. Walesand Ireland appear as administrative problems for the English gov-ernment; and so does England. There is little attempt to use, or toreject, the work of demographersand economichistorians. Social andeconomic questions like enclosure and inflation are discussed only tothe extent that they pose political or administrative problems forgovernments, though this is to some degree corrected by bibliogra-phies (somewhat idiosyncratic)on "SocialStructureand Population,""SocialPolicy,"and "EconomicAffairs." The reader gets no picture ofwhat life was like for the majority of Englishmen who were not partof the central or local administration. Professor Elton makes minimaluse, for instance,of the admirablework on popularreligion in Englandpublished by his editor, Professor Dickens. It is not that Professor


6/8

92 THE HISTORYTEACHERElton does not know about such matters; he simply regards them asunimportant. An introduction which he recently contributed to asplendidcollection of modestand scholarly essays, by a groupof younghistorians approachingthe history of English law from a sociologicalangle, was so condescendingand patronizing that it made one embar-rassed for him. But, having said all that, the real virtues of this bookremain.

Dr. Speck is a less experienced writer than Professor Elton. Norhas he the latter's stylistic gifts. But he compensates by a less old-fashioned approachto his subject matter. He has chapters on "SocialStructure," "Social Change," "The Economy of Early HanoverianBritain," and "TheMaking of the English Ruling Class." He does notdiscuss art or literature in any detail, but he quotes effectively fromwriters of the period-from the obscure as well as from the famous.His book is divided into two parts: 1) "Stability,"a study of En-glish society; and 2) "Strife,"a study of political history. I do not thinkthat this division is entirely successful in solving a perennial problem:it leads to some repetitions. But it does mean that political and ad-ministrative history is set against a background of real life. His En-gland is three-dimensional;there is a two-way relationship betweenrulers and ruled. "Despitethe beliefs of those abovethem, and of somehistorians, the 'lower orders' were quite capable of mounting spon-taneous demonstrations about any and every conceivablegrievance."The reasons for this are made clear when Dr. Speck tells us that"something near to half the population was ... regularly or occasion-ally dependentuponcharity, either parochialorprivate, to keep abovethe subsistence level."

This awareness of the fact that there is mutual reaction betweengovernment and society is one of the book's great strengths. "In theearly days of nonconformityafter the restorationof CharlesII severalpeers and innumerablegentry were identifiable as dissenters. By 1715there were few noble dissenting families left, though they still drewquite substantially on the support of the gentry,"except for the Bap-tists. But by 1760 this gentry support had fallen off:dissenters werelargely tradesmen and artisans. This throws light on the otherwiseperplexing failure of Whig governments after 1714 to live up to theprinciples of religious toleration which they had previously pro-claimed.

"Few could have predicted when the whigs came into their ownin 1714 that within two years they would pass the Riot Act, suspendHabeas Corpus and replace the Triennial Act with the SeptennialAct." Dr. Speck's analysis makes sense of the way in which a party


7/8

NEW HISTORYOF ENGLAND 93that comes to power on one set of slogans can forget them in theprocess of consolidatingits authority, until something like a one-partystate emerges. The turning point in England was the Septennial Actof 1716, which extended the life of Parliaments from three to sevenyears.

Men had been reluctant to invest sums in seats which gaveonly three years' tenure in theory, and only two on average,in practice. Once they were assured of six or seven years'tenure the price of elections began to soar. Several hundredsof pounds,even sums over a thousand, became commonplace.These figures were enough to exclude many landed familieswho could not affordthem, and to frighten others, especiallytories, even if they could.

"For their part the electors, now that issues no longer acted as abarrier against venality, sold out to the highest bidder."Elections were often not worth contesting. "As late as 1722 therewere 17 county contests";in the 1740's and 1750's four was the aver-age. "This is the most compelling evidence that the political elites ofEngland fused into a homogeneous ruling class in the central decadesof the eighteenth century." "Soon after the triumph of whiggery thephilosophical defence of 'liberty and property'narrowed down to theprotection of property even at the cost of infringing liberty."The crucial point is contained in Dr. Speck's phrase, "now thatissues no longer acted as a barrier against venality." He gives shortshrift to the recently fashionable view that there were no live politicalissues under William III and Anne. But the Hanoverian successionchanged all that. It may not have been popular, but there was noalternative. The Stuarts had put themselves out of court by theirapparent determination to restore Catholicismby force, which woulddeprive the gentry of their hard-won control of the church and per-haps of their inherited monastic wealth. Jacobites won some supportin Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland, and among the disgruntledlower classes in England (and there were men who called themselves"Levellers"in the Scottish Lowlandsin the 1720's),butJacobitism wasnot serious politics for the political nation. So the single-party stateevolved, the electorate was painlessly deprived of influence. By 1760Whig oligarchy, City of Londonand Tory squires,"had become reunit-ed in the common interests of the ruling class."The agriculturalrevolution which had started in the seventeenthcentury led to falling food prices; and this "left a surplus betweenincome and expenditure on subsistence which produceda rise in realwages, in urban areas at least." The consequent increased demand


8/8

94 THE HISTORYTEACHERstimulated industrial development elsewhere-in the Potteries, forinstance. Monopoly trade with the colonies producedsimilar results.One wonders what effect this greater urban prosperity had in stimu-lating an expansion of the population. In all this Dr. Speck uses thework of the school of E. P. Thompson,and arrives at conclusions notvery dissimilar to theirs. It seems a pity that in his bibliography heshould refer to Mr. Thompson himself, the most distinguished andcreative writer on his period, in extremely grudging terms.Within their limits, however, these are excellent textbooks. If Iwere advising schoolboys and girls, I would tell them to read ClaireCross's Churchand People,1450-1660 along with ProfessorElton,andJ. H. Plumb'sEngland in the Eighteenth Centuryalongside Dr.Speck.If I were advising university students, I would insist that they read thework of Keith Thomas and E. P. Thompson.Given that, the first twovolumes in this series would be very good for them.

The New History of England

Documents