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Revisionism, Politics and Political Ideas in Early Stuart England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Glenn Burgess
Glenn Burgess
Affiliation:
University of Canterbury, New Zealand
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Type
Review Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , June 1991 , pp. 465 - 478
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 As well as Cogswell, , and Sommerville, in Cust, and Hughes, , the line is taken in Hirst, Derek, ‘The place of principle’, Past and Present XCII (1981), 79–99Google Scholar; and Sommerville, J. P., Politics and ideology in England 1603–1640 (London, 1986)Google Scholar. Related criticisms of revisionism occur also in the writing of Hexter, J. H.: see especially Hexter, ‘The Apology’ in Ollard, R. and Tudor-Craig, P. (eds.), For Veronica Wedgwood these (London, 1986)Google Scholar; and Hexter, , ‘The early Stuarts and parliament: old hat and nouvelle vague’, Parliamentary History, I (1981), 181–216Google Scholar.

2 For an effort in this direction see my ‘On revisionism: early Stuart historiography of the 1970s and 1980s’, Historical Journal XXXIII, 3 (1990)Google Scholar.

3 For example, Richardson adds a sentence to his discussion of Harrington to reflect the work of Davis, J. C. (compare Debate (1977 edn), p. 14Google Scholar, with Debate revisited, p. 15); and his discussion of Clarendon adds a sentence on Clarendon and Hobbes, probably suggested by a recent article by Perez Zagorin, and quotes work by Hutton, Ronald (Debate, 1977 edn, pp. 25, 32Google Scholar; Debate revisited, pp. 27–8, 35).

4 In some of these cases the encyclopaedia style is present in the original version, and merely exacerbated by the revision, but in all cases we learn almost nothing about the works referred to.

5 For the link see Russell, Conrad, Parliaments and English politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 18–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 One attempt at the welding is Clark, J. C. D., Revolution and rebellion: state and society in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A more modest (and satisfactory) effort is Sharpe, Kevin, ‘Crown, parliament and locality: government and communication in early Stuart England’, English Historical Review, C (1986), 321–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, now reprinted in his Politics and ideas in early Stuart England.

7 This is especially apparent in chapters 7 and 8, where new work is presented as a new slant on a traditional genre or approach, and its interconnectedness is slighted.

8 The phrase Richardson quotes is from Hill, Christopher, ‘The Lost Ranters? A critique of J. C. Davis’, History Workshop, XXIV (1987), 139Google Scholar.

9 Also of use, however, is Zaller, Robert, ‘What does the English Revolution mean? Recent historiographical interpretations of mid-seventeenth-century England’, Albion, XVIII (1986), 617–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Cf. Russell, Conrad, ‘Parliamentary history in perspective, 1604–1629’, History, LXI (1976), 18Google Scholar.

11 The roots of the division are now fully analysed in Lake, Peter, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English conformist thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988)Google Scholar.

12 In addition to works under review see Cust, Richard, ‘News and politics in early seventeenth-century England’, Past and Present, CXII (1986), 60–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cogswell, Thomas, ‘The politics of propaganda: Charles I and the people in the 1620s’, Journal of British Studies, XXIX (1990), 187–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Especially Cust, ‘Politics and the electorate in the 1620s’, in Cust and Hughes (eds.), Conflict in early Stuart England, ch. 5. Also, Cogswell, Thomas, The blessed revolution: English politics and the coming of war, 1621–1624 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 20 ffGoogle Scholar.

14 Cogswell, Thomas, ‘England and the Spanish match’, in Cust, and Hughes, (eds.), Conflict in early Stuart England, ch. 4, esp. pp. 128–130Google Scholar; and, at greater length, Cogswell, , The blessed revolution, pp. 6–53Google Scholar.

15 Cogswell, , The blessed revolution, pp. 3–4Google Scholar. Cf. Cust, and Hughes, in their introduction to Cust, and Hughes, (eds.), Conflict in early Stuart England, pp. 13–14Google Scholar; p. 43, n. 31.

16 Morrill, John, The revolt of the provinces: conservatives and radicals in the English Civil War 1630–1650 (London, rev. edn, 1980), preface, pp. ix–xiiGoogle Scholar; Morrill, John, ‘The religious context of the English Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, XXXIV (1984), 155–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Hughes, Ann, ‘Local history and the origins of the Civil War’, in Hughes, and Cust, (eds.), Conflict in early Stuart England, ch. 8. (Quotation at p. 226.)Google Scholar

18 Kishlansky, Mark, Parliamentary selection: social and political choice in early modern England (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 The point is recognized, Cust, , ‘Politics and the electorate’, p. 143Google Scholar.

20 Kishlansky, , Parliamentary selection, p. 73Google Scholar.

21 Thompson, Christopher, ‘Court politics and parliamentary conflict in 1625’, in Cust, and Hughes, (eds.), Conflict in early Stuart England, ch. 6, esp. pp. 185–9Google Scholar.

22 Thompson, Christopher, Parliamentary history in the 1620s: in or out of perspective? (Wivenhoe, 1986), p. 13Google ScholarPubMed. (I would like to thank Dr Thompson for his kindness in supplying me with a copy of this essay.)

23 Hirst, Derek, ‘The privy council and the problems of enforcement in the 1620s’, Journal of British Studies, XVIII (1978), 46–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Starkey, David (ed.), The English court: from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Sharpe, , Politics and ideas, chs. 2, 5, 7Google Scholar.

24 Cogswell, , The blessed revolution, p. 114Google Scholar.

25 Ibid. pp. 100–5, 145 ff.

26 This theme is stated most bluntly in ibid. p. 166.

27 Ibid. ch. 7, esp. pp. 227–8, 260–1.

28 See the interesting remarks on court management of parliament in 1624 in ibid. pp. 219–20.

29 See the explicit linkage in Cogswell, , ‘Politics of propaganda’, p. 190Google Scholar.

30 The crudest measure of this point is the near-total lack of explicit resistance theory in the 1620s (for the exception see Cogswell, , The blessed revolution, p. 31)Google Scholar, and the absence, even in Thomas Scott, of any means of forcing particular policy decisions on a reluctant monarch.

31 Peter Lake, ‘Anti-popery: the structure of a prejudice’, in Cust and Hughes (eds.), Conflict in early Stuart England, ch.3.

32 See J. P. Sommerville, ‘Ideology, property and the constitution’, in Cust and Hughes (eds.), Conflict in early Stuart England, ch. 2. This essay neatly and usefully summarizes, in more historiographically pointed form, the arguments of Sommerville, Politics and ideology.

33 With the exception, perhaps, of Sharpe, ‘History, English law and the renaissance’, in Sharpe, Politics and ideas, ch. 6, an unconvincing response to Donald Kelley.

34 Sharpe, , Politics and ideas, ch. 3 and pp. 123–8Google Scholar.

35 Foster, Andrew, ‘Church policies of the 1630s’, in Cust, and Hughes, (eds.), Conflict in early Stuart England, ch. 7, esp, pp. 210 ffGoogle Scholar.

36 Sharpe, , Politics and ideas, pp. 283–8Google Scholar.

37 It is surely one of the weaknesses of Sommerville's treatment of early modern intellectual patterns that he is so (unconvincingly) dismissive of analogical thinking: Sommerville, , Politics and ideology, pp. 48–9Google Scholar.

38 Sanderson, John, ‘But the people's creatures’ the philosophical basis of the English Civil War (Manchester, 1989), pp. 3–4Google Scholar; p. 180, n. 9.

39 Ibid. p. 2. See Ullmann, Walter, Principles of government and politics in the middle ages (London, 1961), pp. 19–26Google Scholar. A similar dichotomy implicitly underlies Sommerville's work.

40 Mendle, Michael, Dangerous positions: mixed government, the estates of the realm, and the making of the Answer to the xix propositions (Alabama, 1985)Google Scholar.

41 Tuck, Richard, ‘Warrender's De Cive’, Political Studies, XXXIII (1985), 308–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Lamont, William, Marginal Prynne 1600–1669 (London, 1963)Google Scholar; Lamont, , ‘Pamphleteering, the protestant consensus and the English Revolution’, in Richardson, R. C. and Ridden, G. M. (eds.), Freedom and the English revolution (Manchester, 1986), ch. 4Google Scholar.

43 For example, ‘The Parliamentarian enterprise of 1642…was prompted by the “ascending” theory of politics’ (Sanderson, , ‘But the people's creatures, p. 25)Google Scholar; Leveller thought and activity is attributed to intellectual ‘exploration’ (ibid. p. 103); and Charles I ‘was in his death a victim of the “ascending” theory of politics’ or ‘was put to death at the behest of an extrapolated “ascending “ theory’ (ibid. pp. 143, 108).

44 Oakley, Francis, ‘Celestial hierarchies revisited: Walter Ullmann's vision of medieval polities’, Past and Present, LX (1973), 3–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 See passages quoted in Sanderson, , ‘But the people's creatures’, p. 20Google Scholar.

46 But see the quotation from Goodwin, ibid. p. 146 (top).

47 Ibid. pp. 135 ff., 153–6, 175 ff.

48 E.g. ibid. pp. 150–1, 178.

49 Greenleaf, W. H., Order, empiricism and politics: two traditions of English political thought (Oxford, 1964)Google Scholar.

50 Sharpe, , Politics and ideas, pp. 63–71Google Scholar.

51 Collins, Stephen L., From divine cosmos to sovereign state: an intellectual history of consciousness and the idea of order in renaissance England (New York, 1989), p. 26Google Scholar.

52 Ibid. pp. 110–14.

53 On this see the crucially important work of Oakley, Francis, Omnipotence, covenant, and order: an excursion in the history of ideas from Abelard to Leibniz (Ithaca, 1984)Google Scholar.

54 There are some good things, however, in the way in which Collins can bring out similarities between Hobbes and the likes of Henry Parker. See Collins, , Divine cosmos, ch. 5, also pp. 31–2Google Scholar.