Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T11:12:22.525Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Clarendon, Providence and the Historical Revolution*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Michael Finlayson
Get access

Extract

Historians and literary scholars have long agreed that the rate of change in English society in the seventeenth century was so great that only the label “revolution” can do justice to its magnitude. For the past hundred years, most historians who have written about the political upheavals of the middle decades of the century, for example, have taken it for granted that these events constituted a “revolution.” Indeed, the custom of referring to the political turmoil in England between 1640 and 1660 as the “English Revolution” is so established that many scholars would deny that they are relying upon an assumption at all, but would insist that they are simply stating an obvious fact. After 1660, most scholars agree, England's political and constitutional practices and presuppositions were fundamentally different from what they had been before 1640. The permanence of the change, combined with the extraordinary character of political events during the Interregnum, makes the label “revolution” the obvious and appropriate one.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , Winter 1990 , pp. 607 - 632
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I am grateful to the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Board of the University of Toronto whose grant facilitated this research. I am equally grateful to John Morrill, John Morgan, and Norman Zacour whose ideas were even more important.

References

1 Christopher Hill is, pre-eminently, the historian who has explored the systemic links between “new commercial and legal ideas,” the “scientific revolution,” the “general crisis of the seventeenth century,” “Puritanism,” and the “English [bourgeois] revolution.” He concluded his Ford lectures on the intellectual roots of the English Revolution with the assertion that the scientific, legal, and historiographical conflicts “relate to the social and political conflicts in the society which gave them birth,” and so are “different aspects of a single revolution.” Hill, Christopher, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965; Panther ed., 1972)Google Scholar, passim, esp. pp. 2, 4, 268, 300. For an illustration of the way another historian has dealt with the knotty problem of the inter-connectedness of the “economic revolution,” the “historical revolution” and “equally significant developments in literature, philosophy, religion, politics and science,” see Fussner, F. Smith, The Historical Revolution (London, 1962), p. 306.Google Scholar

2 Fussner, , Historical Revolution, pp. 209, 301Google Scholar. Arthur Ferguson agrees that there was a “historical revolution” in Renaissance England, although he sees a less even development in the writing of history by Englishmen between the late sixteenth and the late seventeenth centuries. Ferguson sees this “revolution” as consisting of the “the willingness…to accept social change as an objective of historical investigation fully as worthwhile as the example of deeds done” together with the “ability to find significance in the relativity of customs, ideas, and institutions to varying circumstances.” Ferguson, Arthur B., Clio Unbound. Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England (Durham, N.C., 1979), pp. 434, ix.Google Scholar

3 Fussner, , Historical Revolution, p. 164Google Scholar. See also idem, Tudor History and the Historians (New York, 1970); Ferguson, Arthur B., “Circumstances and the Sense of History in Tudor History: the Coming of the Historical Revolution,” in Headley, John M., ed., Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies, Proceedings of Southeastern Institute of Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies, No. 3 (Chapel Hill, 1968), pp. 170–205.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., pp. 301–02. It is instructive to read Fussner's account of English Renaissance historiography in the broader context provided by Kelley, Donald R., Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (New York, 1970), esp. p. 10 n. 16Google Scholar. Kelley's conclusions are broadly consistent with Fussner's, although his perspective is broader and his categories less simplistic. J. G. A. Pocock agrees that there was a profound change in the character of historical writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, including England. He insists, however, on distinguishing between the work of “scholars and antiquaries” and “literary historians.” The work of the latter, he said, “went serenely on its way,” unaffected by the “critical techniques evolved by the scholars” nor developing its own. Thus Pocock's “historical revolution,” as evidenced by the work of Sir Henry Spelman and Sir Matthew Hale, has little to do with that of Fussner and Hill. According to Pocock, Clarendon was so conservative in his views on the “immemorial constitution” that “no new interpretation of history was to be expected.” Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, does not rate a mention in Pocock's work, presumably because such narrative history has no place in a work on historiographical innovation. Pocock, J. G. A., The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1957), pp. 6,149Google Scholar. Joseph Levine, however, insists that “there was no ‘historical revolution’” and that the “overriding characteristic of the large historical literature of [the later seventeenth century] was its essential identity with the intentions and achievements of Renaissance humanism….Once the problems and techniques of a new historiography had been announced by the first humanist generation after 1500, they changed hardly at all for two or three centuries.” Levine, Joseph M., Humanism and History, the Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca and London, 1987), p. 155.Google Scholar

5 Hill, , Intellectual Origins, pp. ix, 174, 175 n.3, 178.Google Scholar

6 See Finlayson, Michael G., Historians, Puritanism and the English Revolution (Toronto, 1983).Google Scholar

7 All of the occasional essays referred to in this article and the Contemplations and Reflections upon the Psalms: Applying these Devotions to the Troubles of the Times, were published in A Collection of Several Tracts of the Right Honourable Edward, Earl of Clarendon (London, 1727)Google Scholar; Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. Macray, W. Dunn, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1888) [hereafter cited as History].Google Scholar

8 Modern accounts of Clarendon's life and times include three published in recent years. They are Harris, R. W., Clarendon and the English Revolution (London, 1983)Google Scholar; Miller, G. E., Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon (Boston, 1983)Google Scholar; Ollard, Richard, Clarendon and His Friends (London, 1987)Google Scholar. See also, Eustace, Timothy, “Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon,” in Eustace, Timothy, ed., Statesmen and Politicians of the Stuart Age (London, 1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Firth, Charles H., “Clarendon's ‘History of the Rebellion,’” Parts I, II, III, in English Historical Review 19, nos. 73–75 (1904): p. 26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Firth, Charles H., Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon (Oxford, 1909), p. 19.Google Scholar

11 Firth, Charles H., entry on Clarendon in Dictionary of National Biography, 10: 371Google Scholar. Clarendon, , History, 3: 150–56, 240–42Google Scholar. For more recent accounts of Clarendon's position in 1641–42, see Wormald, B. H. G., Clarendon: Politics, History and Religion, 1640–60 (Cambridge, 1951, rev. ed.; Chicago, 1976), esp. pp. 7, 154–58Google Scholar; Fletcher, Anthony, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London, 1981).Google Scholar

12 Roper, Hugh R. Trevor, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon (Oxford, 1975), pp. 8, 28–29Google Scholar; Roper, Hugh R. Trevor, Catholics, Anglican and Puritans (London, 1987), p. 175.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., p. 211.

14 Harris, R. W., Clarendon, pp. 1, 419.Google Scholar

15 Hill, Christopher, “Lord Clarendon and the Puritan Revolution,” in Puritanism and Revolution (London, 1958), pp. 210–14.Google Scholar

16 Ollard, Richard, Clarendon, p. 330.Google Scholar

17 Richardson, R. C., The Debate on the English Revolution Revisited (London, 1988), p. 27.Google Scholar

18 Kenyon, John P., The History Men (London, 1983), pp. 29–30, 33.Google Scholar

19 Macgillivray, Royce, Restoration Historians and the English Civil War (The Hague, 1974), p. 224.Google Scholar

20 Wormald, , Clarendon, pp. 3–4, 240–43Google Scholar. For a clear illustration of Clarendon's reconstruction of the events of 1641 in the light of the next few years, see The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, Written by Himself (Oxford, 1759), pp. 41, 50Google Scholar [hereafter cited as Life].

21 Wormald, , Clarendon, pp. 3–4, 240–43, 276–81Google Scholar. Wormald has said little that places Clarendon's History in its broader historiographical context. He has, however, made two observations that address this question, albeit obliquely. First, in describing the English Revolution of 1640–60 as “a colonizing venture conducted from the twentieth century back into the seventeenth,” he implies a certain scepticism concerning the century's central “revolution,” which belief makes all of the ancillary “revolutions” that much less necessary. Secondly, he suggests that the History underestimates the author's political skills while at the same time it fails to “do full justice to him as a historian.” By relying so heavily on Providence for his explanation of events in the 1650s, he underestimates the importance of his own political contributions, while a review of his “contemporary historical analysis” from which those political contributions flowed makes it clear that “he is a better historian outside his own History than in it.” Ibid., pp. xix, 235.

22 Hutton, Ronald, “Clarendon's History of the Rebellion,” in English Historical Review 97, no. 382 (1982): 88.Google Scholar

23 Shapiro, Barbara J., Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1983), pp. 160, 131, 135Google Scholar; Pocock, , The Ancient Constitution, pp. 6, 149.Google Scholar

24 Literary scholars, who are more concerned with the literary merits of the History than with its historical virtues, seem to harbor few doubts about its quality. See, for instance, Knights, L. C., “Reflections on Clarendon's History of the Rebellion,” in Scrutiny 15, no. 2 (1948): 105–116Google Scholar; Brownley, Martine Watson, Clarendon and the Rhetoric of Historical Form (Philadelphia, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In praising Clarendon's History, twentieth-century scholars are endorsing the judgment that was almost unanimous in the years following its first publication in the early eighteenth century. See Levine, , Humanism, pp. 161, 171, 271.Google Scholar

25 A great deal has been written in recent years on the importance of Providentialism in seventeenth-century English thought and most historians have appeared to link Providentialism with Puritanism. Keith Thomas, for instance, has stressed the importance of the belief in Providence and has explored its ubiquity in all kinds of moral, scientific, and historical thinking in early modern England. While fully aware of its Augustinian and medieval roots, Thomas sees Providentialism as having been re-vitalized by Calvinism, which saw history as the “expression of God's unsearchable purposes.” Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971, Penguin ed.; 1973), p. 106Google Scholar. More explicitly, Paul Seaver has insisted on the link between Puritanism and Providentialism. Describing the providentialist thought of Nehemiah Wallington, Seaver says that his was a “view of history peculiarly suited to the first generation to make a revolution.” Seaver, Paul S., Wallington's World. A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (London, 1985), p. 50 note, however, p. 220, n.8Google Scholar. Similarly, Blair Worden has stressed the importance of Providentialism, especially to Puritans, between 1620 and 1660. See Worden, Blair, “Oliver Cromwell and the Sin of Achan,” in Beales, Derek and Best, Geoffrey, eds., History, Society and the Churches: Essays in honour of Owen Chadwick (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar; Worden, Blair, “Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England,” Past and Present 109 (November 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Worden's essential argument is that “at its period of widest influence, from about 1620 to 1660, Puritan providentialism was a major force in English life and politics. It supplied a coherent, self-contained view of the world….” Worden, , Providence, p. 98Google Scholar. There is no doubt that Puritans had a providentialist view of the world and of history. What is less clear is that Puritan providentialism was distinct from non-puritan providentialism. Worden seems to be in two minds concerning the distinctiveness of Puritan providentialism when he writes that it was “a seventeenth century commonplace,” and that 1620–60 may also have represented the “summit of Continental providentialism too.” It is also important to note that Worden acknowledges that “whatever their differences of theological premise, royalist and Puritan providentialists shared instinctive and profound assumptions,” and that “Roundheads and Cavaliers can sound identical in times of dejection…and in times of triumph.” Worden, , Oliver Cromwell, p. 128Google Scholar; Worden, , Providence, p. 59, n. 12, 87–88Google Scholar. On seventeenth century English providentialism see: Molen, R. J. Vander, “Providence as Mystery,” Church History 47 (1978).Google Scholar

26 Clarendon, , Collection of Tracts, pp. 218, 222.Google Scholar

27 ibid., pp. 226, 236.

28 Ibid., p. 220.

29 Edward, Earl of Clarendon, Religion and Policy and the Countenance and Assistance Each Should Give to the Other, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1811), 1: 12.Google Scholar

30 Clarendon, , Collection of Tracts, pp. 237–38.Google Scholar

31 Raab, Felix, The English Face of Machiavelli (London, 1964), p. 146Google Scholar. For a discussion of the “civil history” admired by most members of the Great Tew Circle and written by Clarendon, see Roper, Trevor, Catholics, pp. 209–14.Google Scholar

32 Clar. MS. 126, 59v, 60, and 60v, 61.

33 Cited in Rabb, , English Face of Machiavelli, p. 159.Google Scholar

34 For an analysis of this first sentence, see Watson, George, “The Reader in Clarendon's History,” Review of English Studies 25, 100 (1974)Google Scholar: passim.

35 State Papers, collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1767–1786), 2: 288.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., pp. 289, 246, 293.

37 Clarendon, , Collection of Tracts, p. 182.Google Scholar

38 For contrasting discussions of the conflicts between the Ancients and the Moderns, see Hill, intellectual Origins, passim and Levine, Origins, passim.

39 Thomas, , Religion, p. 103.Google Scholar

40 S.P., 2: 36. Clarendon's Commonplace Book of 1646–47 contains numerous pages of notes on, among others, Plutarch and Thucydides. See Clarendon MS. 127, f.33–54.

41 Ibid., 2: 386. These were almost exactly the same words he used in the History when he justified the ten-page encomium to Falkland. History, 3: 178–190.Google ScholarPubMed

42 Clarendon, , Collection of Tracts, pp. 237–38.Google Scholar

43 S.P. Clar., 2: 284, 286, 291–92, 318.Google Scholar

44 Resorting to the Psalms at bleak moments in one's life was not unprecedented. Francis Bacon, for instance, after his fall translated some of the Psalms into English verse, although it is possible that there was also a monetary aspect to this literary activity. See Bacon, Francis, Translation of Certain Psalms into English Verse (London, 1625)Google Scholar. More relevant was Oliver Cromwell's resort to the Psalms, especially Psalms 71 and 85 after the defeat of his expedition to Hispaniola in 1655 appeared to make him more conscious of his own and his people's sinfulness and less certain of his providentially-guided future. See Worden, , Oliver Cromwell, p. 145Google Scholar. See also Petrarch's anguished references to the Psalms in a letter he wrote following the election of Innocent VI as Pope in 1352. Zacour, Norman, Petrarch's Book Without a Name (Toronto, 1973), pp. 78ff.Google Scholar

45 For his analysis of the link between Clarendon's Contemplations, his History, and his “judgements on contemporary events,” see Wormald, , Clarendon, pp. 165–173.Google Scholar

46 Clarendon, , Contemplations, pp. 379, 382.Google Scholar

47 Ibid., pp. 387–88.

48 Ibid., pp. 384–85.

49 Ibid., p. 370.

50 Roper, Trevor, Catholics, p. 211.Google Scholar

51 When references to Providence can be found in historical and other writings from the time of Augustine almost up to the present day, it becomes necessary to distinguish between those references to Providence that seem merely conventional and stylistic and those that are “genuine.” This is no easy task. Blair Worden has attempted to make the distinction when he suggests that the “conventional Providentialism” of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries was not “as elaborately structured or as theologically self-conscious as that of the Puritan Revolution.” Providence, p. 59, n. 12. Implicit in most recent discussion of Providentialism is the assumption that the belief was held more firmly by Puritans than by anyone else. Barbara Donagan has explored this problem in several recent articles. While recognizing that “Puritan Providentialism was doctrinally indistinguishable from Anglican and Catholic,” and that it was “Augustinian as well as Calvinist,” she nonetheless ascribes to Puritan Providentialism an “intensity,” “a belief, intensively and personally applied, in the decipherability of particular providences” not seen among non-Puritans (“Providence, Chance and Explanation: Some Paradoxical Aspects of Puritan Views of Causation,” Journal of Religious History, 11, no.3 [June, 1981]: 385, 389, 386Google Scholar). See also idem, “Understanding Providence: The Difficulties of Sir William and Lady Waller,” in Journal of Ecclesiastical History 39, no. 3 (July, 1988): 433-44. In this connection, note Keith Thomas' observation that while “the Puritans had undoubtedly been the readiest to spot God at work in daily occurrences…the principle of divine retribution for evil-doing was upheld by men of every religious opinion” (Thomas, , Religion, p. 112Google Scholar). There is also a helpful discussion of kinds of Providentialism in Vander Molen, Providence. However the distinction is drawn, it is not helpful to see Puritans as enjoying a monopoly of “real” Providentialism while other contemporary Christians, like Clarendon, were merely making merely conventional noises.

52 S.P. Clar., 2: 328.Google Scholar

53 For a classic statement of this belief, see Life, p. 49.

54 S.P. Clar., 2: 342.Google Scholar

55 Ibid., pp. 373, 379, 459; Contemplations, p. 394.

56 Clarendon, , Contemplations, p. 519.Google Scholar

57 Ibid., pp. 520–21.

58 Clarendon, , History, 1: 1–2, 2: 224, 346, 485.Google Scholar

59 Ibid., 6: 29, 143.

60 The best-known contemporary account of the way God intervened constantly in human affairs is by Oliver Cromwell's school-master. Beard, Thomas (The Theatre of God's Judgements [London, 1597])Google Scholar. For a sample of recent scholarly literature, see notes 25 and 51 above.

61 For two contrasting discussions of Walter Ralegh's History of the World, see SirFirth, Charles H.Walter Raleigh's “History of the World,” in his Essays, Historical and Literary (Oxford, 1938)Google Scholar, and Racin, John, Sir Walter Ralegh as Historian: An Analysis of the History of the World (Salzburg, 1974)Google Scholar. Racin describes Ralegh's “conception of History” as one “rooted in paradox” (p. 39). Firth's comments on Ralegh are not always helpful, as when he stated that “Ralegh accepted and followed the Ciceronian conception of History,” to which he added without apparent contradiction, the “Christian or Puritan conception, that all the events that happened in the world were divinely ordained” (pp. 43–44). See also Christopher Hill's extensive discussion of Ralegh in Intellectual Origins. Note Hill's observation that “even Clarendon had a belief in the working of divine law in history which was very similar to Ralegh's” (p. 186).

62 Ralegh, Walter, The History of the World (London, 1614)Google Scholar, Preface, B.5, A.3, A.4v.

63 Christopher Hill notes that “Ralegh's History of the World is the only book Oliver Cromwell is known to have recommended” (intellectual Origins, p. 2). For the reputation of Ralegh's History among seventeenth century Englishmen, see Racin, , Sir Walter Ralegh, pp. 27–32.Google Scholar

64 A Collection of all the publicke Orders, Ordinances and Declarations of both Houses of Parliament…, ed. Husband, Edward (London, 1646), p. 263.Google Scholar

65 May, Thomas, The History of the Parliament of England (London, 1647), pp. 7, 15Google Scholar, For a perceptive study of the major contemporary Civil War historians, see Hartman, Mark Phillip, Contemporary Explanations of the English Revolution, 1640–1660 (Ph. D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1977), pp. 131ff.Google Scholar

66 Cited in Hartman, , Contemporary Explanations, pp. 176–77.Google Scholar

67 Clarendon, , History, 1: 1–2.Google Scholar

68 Ibid., 6: 234. For a brief discussion of the role of Providence in Clarendon's History, see Macgillivray, R., Restoration Historians, pp. 220–22Google Scholar. Note also Richard Ollard's comment that “the idea of the divine purpose is central to Clarendon's understanding of the events through which he lived” (Clarendon, p. 334). It is worth noting that despite Blair Worden's belief that there was a kind of Providentialism that was peculiar to the Puritans, and that one “cannot understand Puritan politics without understanding the Puritan belief in Providence,” he also writes “the explanation of the Restoration in the concluding paragraph of Clarendon's History of the Rebellion is ‘Puritan’ in its providentialism” (Providence, pp. 98, 89).

69 Ferguson, , Clio Unbound, pp. 157, 204Google Scholar; Pocock, , The Ancient Constitution, p. 174.Google Scholar

70 Clarendon, , “Contemplations,” in Collection of Tracts, p. 372.Google Scholar