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The Grand Inquisitor
By J. H PLUMB Tills masterpiece* was first published nearly thirty years ago. It is difficult to think of any work of scholarship that has lasted so well. 'Within the same period of time, Maitland's Domesday Book and Beyond, a work comparable o this in originality and acuteness of analysis, was subject to serious, revision. Sir Lewis Namier attracts imitators mot critics, and only Professor Butterfield has suggested that there might be a need to stand farther back from Sir Lewis's work and view it in a more distant perspective.
l'his is a strange turn in the wheel of fortune.
After the publication of The Structure of Politics 2ny man of judgment would have forecast that the highest honours of the academic world would have awaited Sir Lewis Namier's plucking. Actually it brought him the Chair of Modern History at Manchester and there he remained for the rest of his academic life. Recognition came late. Since the war honours, richly deserved, have poured upon him; his disciples proliferate in the lush pastures of eighteenth-century politi- cal history and `to Namierise' is now a part of the professional jargon. Adulation has re- placed indifference; with the republication of his great work perhaps the time has come to try to assess the range and quality of Sir Lewis Namier's contribution to eighteenth-century scholarship.
It depends, as yet, largely on this book, for England in the Age of the American Revolution (a wildly misleading title) is in many ways its second volume : an analysis at a different level of many of the ideas of the Structure. Everyone will regret that Sir Lewis Namier has felt the necessity to spend so many of the best years of his creative life battling with the problems of modern diplo- matic history, although it is easy enough to sympathise with the cause of it. In consequence, his work lies like a vast foundation of an unbuilt, yet magnificent, palladian mansion. The design is apparent, the materials abound, even the beauties can be imagined, but the great narrative history must now be written by other hands. Time has passed; and Gibbon and Macaulay re- main unchallenged.
Yet Namier has excelled. In scholarship he has few masters. His knowledge of Parliament be- tween 1750 and 1780 is quite astonishing. Thousands of members people his brain like living men. The way they talked, the way they worked, whom they married, whence came their money and influence, their aspirations, jealousies, loyalties and treacheries are all exactly known or not known. There are no e THE STRUCTURE OF POLITICS AT THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE III. By Sir Lewis Namier. (Macmillan, 50s.) guesses in Sir Lewis Namier's world. Evidence, in any quantity, is the firm basis of his scholar- ship. And he rarely spares his readers; a third or more of a Namier book is quotation; in an article or review the proportion will be greater. The effect is to give a sense not only of veracity but also of immediacy; life in all of its chaotic moment-to-moment confusion is spread before the reader. (A comparison of Sir Lewis Namier's type of history, with its insistence on detail and on minute divisions of time, with developments in modern literature and painting would be neither so barren nor so forced as might appear at first sight.) Naturally, such a method tends to be a dis- solvent of generalisation. The patronage and corruption of small boroughs in the eighteenth century which had been a simple historical con- cept, as easily described as denounced in other hands, acquires in Sir Lewis's the complexity of life itself, and is viewed with the charity that life demands.
. . . the more one knows about the internal conditions of boroughs (as about the characters of men) the more difficult it is to classify them. Weather-charts are weakest where there are no proper stations for observation.
But Sir Lewis's stations of observation are multifarious, from the mountainous archives of Newcastle and Hardwicke to the stray letters of back-benchers; even an engagement book is made to yield another dimension in his complex geometry. And to this precise, vast scholarship he brings wisdom. His comments on men and the actions of men are fresh, just and implicit with truth. History such as this, which carries convic- tion in every line, is indeed rare; the same wisdom, the same truth is to be discovered on those exceptional occasions when Sir Lewis per- mits himself a broad generalisation.
The result of any electoral system is a House consisting of individuals representative not so much because they have passed through a peculiar and possibly altogether irrelevant system of 'election,' but because they belong to circles which are primarily concerned with the nation's political business and form therefore the political nation.
Such large comments are uncommon. After scholarship and wisdom comes suspicion. Race, nature and intelligence have all combined to make Sir Lewis wary. That George HI brought back the Tories into power, that the Duke of New- castle corrupted men and boroughs with secret- service money, that the King wished to revive a Stuart despotism, carried for' him no imme- diate conviction and, when examined closely, filled him with scorn. Like that similar but lesser scholar, J. H. Round, Sir -Lewis enjoys destroy- ing his enemies or battering false scholarship, and he proceeded with obvious relish to smash these hoary myths to smithereens, to such effect that, thirty years later, these statements are beginmhl g to disappear from the textbooks. For the dis- semination of historical truth, this is speedy. Along with the rest has gone that age-old dichotomy, the two-party system. In its place is a subtler, more complex, world of politics—com- peting Whigs, permanent officials, hereditary Tories and independent gentlemen—that will always be associated with Sir Lewis's nante. Disciples have, with more loyalty than sense, tried to rivet this Namier world on generations for whom party strife possessed greater meaning. This, too, is a measure of an historian's great' ness, that he should directly influence fields of scholarship widely dissimilar to his own. The illumination which his techniques may bring IS a reflection of his powers; the errors are not Ins. This view of eighteenth-century politics, estab- lished with such a wealth of detail, is a remark- able achievement and one which will, probablY, bear the test of time. 'Probably,' only becaus.o there are areas of investigation which Sir Lewis has eschewed. The political nation, even in the mid-eighteenth century, was not co-extensive with the House of Commons or the electors to it A more amorphous world of political feeling, based on attitudes to the past, concepts of law and constitution, also' existed. The dissenters, shopkeepers, manufacturers, squires and parsons who read and argued and quarrelled, had an image of themselves as Englishmen possessing a singular political tradition. And they, too, eve° those excluded from formal politics, could bring their pressure to bear. It is interesting that Sir Lewis has never been interested in the reverbera- tions of political decisions, uses newspaPers rarely as a source, and deliberately excludes the cities of London and Westminster from his sur- vey. Of course, the realm of political ideas and attitudes is treacherous and difficult to assess—the evidence like a Himalaya of feathers, 110 sooner touched than dispersed. Yet it is a Parrt of all constituencies, the background to an MP 5 life, an essential part of politics' structure, flesh if not bones, and as necessary for the full under- standing of eighteenth-century politics as the work which Sir Lewis has done so well.
Only time can show Sir Lewis's proper place in English historical studies, yet no one would deny that it will be a very high one. His ruthless scholarship has rarely been matched, few cleverer men have written history, no one has rivalled his capacity to destroy what is false, although in narrative power and literary skill he has frequently been excelled. I doubt if there IS an historian, living or dead, who would not have been proud to have written The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III.
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